Here Lies Crap

Yesterday I went to David Byrne’s Musical about Imelda Marcos, Here Lies Love. This is simply, Evita 2.0 with a disco beat.

This is not a new piece nor does it seem even adapted or changed from its original concept with its move to Broadway when it was first imagined over 10 years ago. It has been presented as a song cycle at Carnegie Hall in 2007; productions in 2012 at Mass MoCA; in 2013 at the Public Theater and a second engagement a year later, and in 2017 at the Seattle Repertory Theater. At one point did anyone really examine the material and take a hard look at the production or were they in awe of David Byrne? I am guessing the latter.

It is wildly off putting. I found one critical review of the London production in The Guardian but most of the reviews are stellar and without debate. It amazes me that now in 2023 once again we are seeing the same version but Byrne added Filipino comic Joy Koy as a Producer and the musical artist HER in which to give it some apparent credibility. And they continue to add more “authentic” voices who do what exactly? Really this is what one does and thinks this is okay? Or is this truly whitewashing in every sense of the word? (Just 2 hours ago on 7/11 they added one more. Dear God the desperation is obvious)

I went with the idea it would be interesting and did not read any reviews of prior productions as this is now Broadway and usually alterations are made to accommodate the format. That did not happen as this controversy around the showing lacking live Musicians demonstrates. Where they were and what they played or if at all is not evident despite me looking for them or even hearing them. This production is pure Karoke and I would have rather gone to the Britney Spears Musical as at least she is by far more likeable than Imelda Marcos. That said, I also was curious as if this was going to follow the Evita format where as she evolves into a despot as ego manical and dangerous as her husband but still trying to resonate some compassion or sympathy. Or was it going to be full camp? Well neither, Imelda is portrayed “sympathetically” but hardly accurately. We know that Imelda had zero to few second thoughts, she did not evolve or change even when kicked out of the Country. There was no Epiphany or realization that the people revolt was that and it was all due to a love gone bad. Just like many Opera’s and Musicals often do, the Heroine comes to her senses and then begs forgiveness and often dies either from a disease or by her own hand. Nope, not here. Well I did not stay for the final 30 minutes of this 90 minute hot mess of disco-mania, so maybe I missed that. With that I am writing a musical about Kim Jong Un and how he is misunderstood and is actually Non-Binary and wanted only acceptance in a world of hetero-normatives. Who does not want their Daddy Dictator’s love? All of it to a K-Pop beat! I see hit all over this.

I had not thought of the Marcos family until last year with the election of their Son which has been an issue of true debate and what that means for the Philippines after years of abuse, martial law then and even in the present time, post-Marcos. All which happened despite a revolt and decades later when the U.S. Government air lifted the family out of the country and to Hawaii where they waited out their end of days in comfort and a nice Tiki drink I assume in hand. But like all bad penny’s the Marcos did return, and again this “musical” with the slight addendum (adding the original Imelda, Lea Salonga) is not a source of information or even accurate history. What it is is a bizarre way of establishing a legacy based on Disco? Apparently at the end of the Karoke show (I left early thankfully), they do announce the return of the Son as the current President. A sort of passing mention. Yikes what an insult. And it appears that nothing will improve for that country or establishing any Democracy there, so this glossy bit of bullshit does what exactly? Makes people of East Asian a voice on Broadway? Well this has been the case in the past and many times but not a fully realized production of Asian voices. Here Lies Love is not either, no matter whose name is added to the credits. It is not again a piece produced or written by anyone who was there, was affected by it or have a goat in the race. It is utter bullshit.

But this ain’t no disco and we are not fooling around. The concept is supposedly an immersion in the action as an Audience we are dancers/players in the scene that transpires above us on moving catwalks that retract and the Actors do their varying karaoke songs in varying degrees and levels of talent as we rotate around them being literally wrangled by pink jump suited bouncers who shove/propel and scold us into our locations. There is the idea it is to give you the idea of being a member of the party, which kind and where is unclear; It is a cluster fuck of massive proportions. There are seats in rings above this, much as any theater in the round has done and I have no idea what that is like as it must be looking down upon madness as a few of the unsuspecting audience are forced to interact the one time with a supposed newsman. The insistence we dance is done from a DJ who is above the scene below. You are shoved and moved and pushed constantly. You cannot always see and in turn they pass out earphones out front and I took a pair and could see why, it is loud to the point it is like a bad disco. As a result I often could not hear the commands to move and at one point was standing in a small spot alone so I could see/hear and was told to move, so I took one step to the left and then another to the right, and asked which I could stand in. I was told either just not there. Okay then. So I said, “How do I get out of here?” That shocked them as I am sure no one had the audacity to dare leave this incredible presentation I am sure. Well there is always a first. As I was escorted out the plastic strips to divide the exit doors promptly hit me in the face and my Glasses scraped where I had just had a small skin caner lesion removed. The pain was unbelievable and I was blinded for a moment. She then took me to the coat check which was the wrong one they are color coded as we on the floor were told to check all bags and phones and yet I saw plenty of folks with both on their person. So much for consistency. So they found the right one and then he could not find my bag and coat. So much for consistency. Glad I left early as it had a wallet, cell phone and my Subway/PATH pass. I am sure Imelda would have loved it, being one was a Prada and the other Gucci. I cannot imagine what it would be like post play and the exodus of chaos in that case.

And that is what Here Lies Love is, misguided history. And despite this, Imelda is a fascinating woman of her own, another Evita, and who, like her Husband, a Woman with dreams and ambition which goes horribly wrong. The Marcos, like the Peron’s, achieved a place in a world that doesn’t really accept them as they are/or were and yet despite what they could of done for their people they chose not, instead millions were diverted, Governments overthrown and misery resulted. You cannot get more Operatic and right there is that story there, a story Byrne fails to fully capture. It was the one song that I did finally listen to and could hear, the Don’t Cry for Me moment, when Imelda sings about how Marcos loved her when they met, he loved her as she was but as the the decades came and went he tried to remake her in images of other women; as she sang photos of Grace Kelly and Jackie Kennedy and other famous American women were flashing in the background. It says a great deal about White and Privilege right there. And that was the true 11 o’clock number lost in the miasma of Disco Inferno.

The reviews to the Karoke play I am sure will be like those before – fantastic, but in reality this is a piece of shit disguised as a Musical. The story of the Marcos Family are truly Operatic and like many a Musical, Sweeney Todd comes to mind are perfect for the stage at the Met Opera and many an Opera has found itself a Musical, Rent has found a similar path. I truly feel Champion, Terrance Blanchard’s Opera is better suited for that audience vs the Met but again this is art, it is living. But Here Lies Love is not living art it is a farce. No live Musicians, the corralling, the shoving, and the sheer lack of truth to the story is appalling. But this stage is one that I will never set foot in again. And it makes me question David Byrne and his own decision making process to believe this is art or storytelling of any kind.

I leave you with this detailed analysis of the work by someone more qualified to critique that story and now I am a going to dance, it’s Pride and Gay or Straight and everything in between (that is from the great Kinky Boots) should always be proud.

Here Lies White Ignorance: The Whitewashed Mythology of Imelda Marcos in the Music of David Byrne’s “Here Lies Love”

Lola Sampaguita

08.09.2021

Cover image for “Here Lies Love.”

Slim Aarons

How can white artists and consumers more critically engage with works of art that represent, profit from, and thereby exploit the historical and generational traumas of people and cultures of color?

David Byrne, the white creator of the concept album and musical in question called Here Lies Love, has likely never stopped to consider such a question before. And neither has the affluent English singer Florence Welch, along with the majority-white roster of vocalists who participated in the recording of the concept album at hand.

On Byrne’s website, visitors are greeted with a full-page slideshow that reads, in order, “Here Lies Love is a disco musical that tells the story of Imelda Marcos and the People Power Revolution in the Philippines.” “Previous runs were staged at the Adelaide Festival of Arts in Australia, Carnegie Hall, Terminal 5, The Public Theater in NYC and The National Theatre in London.” “The first album was recorded with guest vocalists for every song.” “Then DB released the HLL Cast Album featuring the cast from the first run at The Public Theater.”

Although 11 years have passed since the initial release of Here Lies Love in April of 2010, the concept album still reeks heavily of white ignorance and white privilege. The 22 songs on the first recording of Here Lies Love are centered around the life of Imelda Marcos, who is widely known as a Filipino politician and the widow of the long-deceased dictator Ferdinand Marcos. Throughout the traumatic two-decade Martial Law chapter of Philippine history, in which the Marcoses were at the height of their political power from 1965 to 1986, at least 10 billion dollars were stolen from the Central Bank of the Philippines to fund the Marcoses’ criminal and political exploits. These billions of dollars were in turn covertly used to fund and finance the Marcoses’ overtly luxurious lifestyle. The Marcoses’ stolen wealth has remained firmly intact (and largely unreturned to the Filipino people) since the end of their political regime in 1986.

Moreover, countless human rights abuses and violations were enacted during the Martial Law era to silence mass dissent and keep the Marcos presidency intact. In a Rappler article entitled “Stories of death during the Marcos regime,” author Amado L. Picardal shares firsthand accounts of the “arrest, torture, and imprisonment” that he and his family members experienced during the Martial Law era. Unfortunately, these accounts of severe human rights violations are only a small fraction of the overarching number of atrocities that took place during the Martial Law era — none of which were duly acknowledged throughout the entire project of Here Lies Love.

Despite the unfathomable consequences of the historical and generational pain and trauma that are inherently (and undeniably) linked to this specific period of Philippine history, Here Lies Love treats the Martial Law period and the criminal life of Imelda Marcos as if both were playgrounds for musical spectacle, white aesthetics, and white creativity. The following selection of songs from Here Lies Love is sufficient to show that the Filipino people who were brutally oppressed during the Martial Law period were among the last on Byrne’s mind while he created this concept album that has unfortunately been streamed by millions of people around the world to date.

Imelda Marcos stands in her home amongst her possesions.Lauren Greenfield

1. “Here Lies Love,” written by David Byrne/Fatboy Slim and performed by Florence Welch

In the album’s title track, Florence Welch serves as the narrator of a story that she has surely never experienced in her entire life — growing up poor as a young girl in the Philippines. In “Here Lies Love,” Welch sings from Imelda’s perspective, “When I was a young girl in Leyte, my dresses were all scraps and hand-me-downs.” Aside from the base-level absurdity of listening to a white woman singing from the perspective of a would-be dictator and human rights criminal, it feels painful to listen to the way that Welch (with her English accent) botches the pronunciation of the Philippine province Leyte. The remainder of the song builds upon these small yet overt displays of white ignorance, and further exposes the questionable nature of the fact that Byrne felt it was an appropriate decision to hire a white and affluent vocalist to sing about the psychology of aspiring towards wealth and class privilege — specifically from the perspective of a young Filipino girl.

Throughout the second verse, Byrne attempts to humanize Imelda by presenting her as “a simple country girl” who “had a dream” and lived “a stone’s throw from the palace.” Bryne’s lyrics perpetuate the classist “rags-to-riches” narrative that is often used to justify Imelda’s desire to attain wealth, luxury, and political power. He does the same in another song on the album entitled “Every Drop of Rain,” in which white women singers Candi Payne and St. Vincent perform a duet about childhood poverty from the perspective of young Imelda and her former caretaker Estrella Cumpas.

In a 2010 interview with TIME magazine, Byrne states that he created Here Lies Love because “he’d like listeners to “reluctantly empathize” with his version of Imelda.” Byrne claims, “Audiences already have a certain amount of knowledge — it might be just the shoes and the money in the Swiss bank accounts. So I have to let people know what drove her to this, and to see if they can see things from her point of view. Which is not to excuse her, but there are human drives and passions that are played out on a national scale sometimes.”

Here, Byrne reductively suggests that a torturous regime marred by death and corruption, specifically at the expense of poor and working-class Filipinos, was simply a result of “human drives and passions played out on a national scale.” Only wealthy white artists like Byrne would feel entitled to create such art that attempts to humanize and empathize with historically oppressive figures such as the Marcoses. Not once throughout the entire project of Here Lies Love did Byrne bother to uplift the voices of the Filipino people whose families were killed, or perhaps to center the stories of the Filipino activists who survived the brutal torture methods that were inflicted on those who were openly critical of the regime.

Byrne’s decision to approach the history of Martial Law from a detached and whitewashed perspective is nothing short of typical privileged white man behavior. Additionally, one might ask — what might have motivated a white singer like Welch to participate in this project about a corrupt and elite politician like Imelda, perhaps without any concrete awareness of the trauma and history that the Marcoses represent?

In the chorus, Welch repeatedly sings the phrase “Here lies love… here lies love… here lies love.” Byrne states that he chose these words for the album title because Imelda “is quoted as wanting [them] inscribed on her grave.” The title alone is an apt display of Byrne’s conscious decision to focus on the project of mythologizing Imelda as a fraught woman who desired “love” and “beauty” all her life, rather than choosing to present her as the corrupt human rights criminal she is. In the words of writer Luis Francia, “Someone who genuinely loves her country, as Imelda keeps declaring, would never have acted the way she did and does. What I suspect Imelda truly adores, beyond her grandiose sense of self, is the notion of love. Real people, unfortunately, get in the way…”

Imelda Marcos wears a terno in Paris.Agence France-Presse

2. “Pretty Face,” written by David Byrne and performed by Camille

In the lyrics of “Pretty Face,” Byrne continues to paint a deceptively innocent picture of Imelda’s facade as a hospitable and charitable First Lady whose primary motivation as a politician was to promote beauty, philanthropy, and the arts. The danger of such an undertaking is that listeners who are largely uninformed about the harsh reality of the Martial Law era — specifically in terms of the extreme trauma that it inflicted (and continues to inflict) upon the Filipino collective consciousness — may very well be misled by Byrne’s lyrics into believing that Ferdinand and Imelda were indeed progressive, charitable, and well-intentioned leaders throughout their two-decade regime.

At the beginning of the first verse, the French vocalist Camille sings, “Will you reach into your pockets? / And show us that you care / For the orphans and the farmers / Everyone give their share.” These opening lines allude to what journalist Raissa Robles describes as the “supposed charitable foundations [that the Marcoses created] in Liechtenstein and elsewhere, which they then used to open secret bank accounts in Switzerland.” In an article entitled “Imelda Marcos verdict shows scheme to earn $200M from Swiss foundations,” journalist Lian Buan quotes Associate Justice Maryann Corpus-Mañalac, who stated that “The purpose of setting up these entities [was] definitely not charitable, educational, religious or otherwise in service of public interests.” Buan writes that these pseudo-foundations were instead wholly directed towards “the private benefit of the Marcoses and their beneficiaries.”

The lyrics of “Pretty Face” contain zero mention of the fact that although the Marcoses have been long confirmed to have amassed billions of stolen wealth from these nonexistent foundations, even decades before the release of the aforementioned verdicts in 2018, they remain largely unscathed and free of the consequences of their crimes to this day. In a TIME magazine interview, Byrne claims that he “researched the Marcos era for a year” before he started writing and composing these songs. Whether or not Byrne’s lyrics are meant to be satirical, his lyrics perpetuate the revisionist view of Imelda as a passive First Lady who had absolutely nothing to do with the corruption and human rights violations that were enacted throughout her husband’s presidency.

Byrne’s undertaking is particularly dangerous for the album’s majority-white consumers, who are more than likely to be unaware of who Imelda is, aside from her one-dimensional and caricatural persona as “a charitable First Lady obsessed with beauty, fashion, luxury, and the arts.” By choosing to portray Imelda through a revisionist and whitewashed lens, Byrne effectively silences the truth that Imelda was directly responsible for the extreme corruption and human rights violations that ensued throughout her husband’s two-decade rule.

Marielle Lucenio: “An activist holds a poster urging the public not to forget the atrocities of martial law during a protest rally in Quezon City on September 21, 2020.”Jire Carreon

3. “Order 1081,” written by David Byrne and performed by Natalie Merchant

Why do white artists feel so entitled to present themselves as experts and authoritative voices on the violent and traumatic histories of cultures and communities of color? Moreover, why do they feel creatively called to make a spectacle out of the violence that has historically been inflicted upon marginalized bodies?

On his official Twitter page, Byrne tweeted, “‘Order 1081’ is the declaration of martial law signed by Ferdinand Marcos in 1972 — essentially the end of democracy in the Philippines until the Pope came to visit in 1981.” He then links a “full music video” to the song in which Natalie Merchant serves as lead vocalist.

While Merchant sings the lyrics “A bomb went off this morning — raining bodies on TV,” viewers are presented with a short video clip containing archival footage of Marcos speaking on national television and a wounded Filipino woman seeking medical help on the street. Merchant continues to sing eerily simplistic and journalistic lines such as “They are blaming the insurgents, they are blocking off the streets” alongside more archival footage of Filipinos protesting on the street. The entire music video reads like a detached and whitewashed documentary in which Filipino people and Filipino history are treated as objects of fascination for a largely white audience.

Hearing Merchant sing the words “Now the sunsets are incredible across Manila Bay / You can hear the bombers landing at the U.S. Air Force Base” is enough to make anyone’s blood curl — more specifically, anyone with any degree of awareness surrounding the generational trauma that both U.S. imperialism and the Martial Law era have inflicted onto the Philippines, in addition to the never-ending trauma induced by 500 years of Spanish colonial rule. Towards the middle of the song, Merchant even continues to sing lines that perpetuate a white tourist’s colonial and stereotypical view of the Philippines, such as “Now we live down by the water in a shack that’s made of wood” and “Got to clear away these shanties and these ugly nipa huts.”

There doesn’t seem to be a solid reason for the existence of this song, other than that white artists are fascinated by any form of history and spectacle that involves the large-scale suffering and trauma of marginalized people. As Luis Francia writes in his article about Here Lies Love entitled “When Disco Was the Soundtrack to Martial Law,“ “Beyond superficial nods to political events such as the declaration of martial law (“Order 1081”) and the imprisonment of Senator Benigno “Ninoy” Aquino (“Seven Years”) — the Marcoses’ most celebrated political opponent, whose assassination in 1983 eventually led to the demise of the regime — there is no sense of the public and political context that shaped Imelda, a grievous omission that undercuts Here Lies Love‘s attempt to investigate what as well as who made Imelda what she is.”

Thumbnail for a video entitled “David Byrne Discos w/ Imelda Marcos in HERE LIES LOVE.”YouTube

Mirroring the same set of questions that Byrne asks of himself as he navigates his primary motivations for creating Here Lies Love, what is the driving force behind white artists who shamelessly use the traumatic history of marginalized people as fodder for their creative work? How might these white artists’ creative efforts serve as an attempt to, in Byrne’s own words, “make and then remake” the history of people and cultures of color from an oppressive and predominantly whitewashed gaze?

Through an unfortunate array of danceable melodies and clubby disco beats, Byrne reduces into spectacle a deeply traumatic history that has unarguably caused irreversible damage towards the lives and psyches of generations of Filipino people. In Here Lies Love, Byrne unapologetically centers his voice as a privileged white man, along with the voices of the majority-white vocalists whom he inappropriately hired to tell the story of one of the most violent periods of Philippine history. Moreover, by using his far-reaching platform to center the interiority and narratives of Imelda and her co-conspirators, Byrne silences the voices and stories of the poor and working-class Filipino families and student activists whose loved ones were brutally harmed and killed, and who themselves lived to survive the Marcoses’ greedy and bloodthirsty regime.

As an affluent and well-known musician who most likely earned thousands (if not millions) of dollars from the public consumption of this project alone, Byrne is simply another addition to the exhausting canon of white artists who have chosen to utilize the trauma and suffering of marginalized people as mere subject matter for their shockingly mediocre and carelessly over-funded creative work.

Thoughts, Prayers, what.ever

Another shooting on a campus, this one a College at UVA. Meanwhile across the country in Idaho outside the campus four were found dead believed to be a homicide.

I wrote about the school I used to teach at and where I began my career in Teaching in 1996. It was the students who kept me going and I believed in them and with that I no longer do. I have come to fear and dislike them. The lack of any dignity for themselves and others is most apparent. It was happening long before Covid and I saw that in Nashville and now in Jersey City that is only further exacerbated by the pandemic and distinction between those who managed to attend private or charter schools that remained open or had access to better online learning tools that also allowed them to forge forward on the path of academia. But with that I have already written about the challenges and adjustments made by those who went onto higher learning and have struggled, often blaming others and leading to Professors being terminated as their work was too challenging, they were unavailable or many other factors that seemingly have little to do with their actual skills or abilities that lend to achievement. That is our current state of affairs and again has been happening for quite some time – lay blame, point fingers and deny any personal responsibility or have any accountability.

Now we have 99 problems that have come from the pandemic and the magnifying glass that was finally placed upon the social inequity of our country and its heavy systemic and broken systems that are racist and elitist enabled those who for whatever reason seemingly knew nothing about it did. They read the right books, attended the right protests and then went back home to post their endless diatribes on social media to validate and confirm their wokeness. And with that the pendulum swung from left to right and with that we now have curriculum banning, book banning, conversations and word banning and a divisiveness that is now entrenched with the words”crime” as the dog whistle to remind everyone that the others are dangerous and could do harm. What “they” do harm with is of course guns but that is okay as now we are opening the flood gates and allowing anyone within arms reach of a gun to have one. It is working out great as the age of shooters are declining as access to guns is increasing. Coincidence much?

The political divisiveness was always a problem but we are back to serious racial ones. For those who were citing George Floyd as their moment to defund the Police, I suggest they turn back the clock to Michael Brown, or earlier to Eric Garner (2014) or earlier to Amadou Diallo. Or to any number of Police Brutality cases that may or may not have ended with death but serious harm and long term damage. There are no shortage of them but until Michael Brown there was what? Little accountability or information with regards to the number of cases thanks to no single source of record keeping. There are so many different agencies that are under the umbrella of law enforcement it is why many did not know and with that so many Police who were ultimately let go for said behavior simply transferred to another agency and continued to act in the manner that was less about serving and protecting the public, but of their own needs and beliefs. Think about the amount of law enforcement in your community, the City Police, the State Patrol, the County Police, the Transit Enforcement, the Port Authority are just some that all work or have business here in New Jersey. Then you have the Federal Agencies and their distinct Police – the FDA, the FBI, the CIA, the ATF and all of them have jurisdictions that supersede the State and Municipal ones. Yeah you can run but you can never hide.

But the reality is that despite it all Guns are the most significant tool and weapon we carry. The ATF is the single largest organization in which to regulate and enforce gun legislation but we have little to NO federal laws over guns and with that the piecemeal of laws that States and Cities try to enact are now being taken to the largest Federal Court in the land to overturn them. One minute it is State’s rights to create and enforce laws regarding Abortion but not when it comes thanks to the pesky 2nd Amendment. So with that it is Check and Mate on gun control. And yet when it comes to ATF they are being played well by Chess Masters that defy game play.

The constant refrain is that it is a Mental Health issue , and with that the idea that anyone who is nuts will not be able to get a gun. Sure that is a belief, but despite it all few if any of the most recent shooters had a mental health “red flag” that would have prevented them from doing so. I point to the Michigan shooter as his Parents are awaiting trial for their role in enabling if not encouraging their fucked up son from having a gun despite the school sharing with them their concerns. Great parents there. And the same goes for the Parade kid whose Dad bought him his gun. More shooters, more guns and more dead. Thoughts and prayers.

And so now with the crime bullshit being the least mentioned factor in the midterm and abortion as the reason many went to the polls will anything change? In a word? Fuck no. Okay that is two but in reality we are a Nation of Karen’s and Ken’s (their male equivalent) who are sure they are right about their indignant feelings of entitlement and rightness. That is the new “wokeness” as the aggrieved state of it all is about their inconveniences, their accommodations and their betterness about being white and yet no one is accommodating them? But they read White Privilege isn’t that enough? No, for anyone who is not like you, just like you, if not in actual color but in belief and demeanor, you are not white enough, so no clearly no. But a gun can solve that. If you fail to kill yourself with it try killing your own. It will work out well. Or not.

A Week of Reviews

As the Pandemonium continues, the debates over closing schools rages on. I have little more to say of this subject as a former Teacher, current Substitute I have been in many many schools, literally from the West Coast to the East Coast and the South in between. To say they are all bad is a misnomer, some are better than others and that is the same across the country. The schools that are labeled “Magnet” or some other code word, for White, continue to hold onto their position in a community district as the reason people fight to get into that school. In Seattle that was Garfield High School, a school that was segregated by color and by academics. They claimed balance was achieved by pointing to the “diversity” of enrollment. What they meant to say, “We have a ton of Black kids in the sports programs, tons of White kids in the advanced academics and then the drama and music programs integrate them” Okay then. That was the same as the other achievement school, Roosevelt in the North part of Seattle. Divided by city racial and economic lines, school integration was a success and they took it to the Supreme Court to defend it, and that is how busing ended. Seattle is a joke and farce when it comes to public education and with it that idea that Liberal people are open minded need to know that means in the mind part, the actual doing part, not so much. I could say the same about New York City across the river. The schools are one of the most segregated in the country and that will not change. The NY “scold’ is exactly the doppelganger of the Seattle scold, the city that gave us White Privilege. Yes that is where Robin D’Angelo the author is from, and where she attended a private Catholic University to devise her theory on that subject. Good place in which to do so, a city with few Black residents and most of them are working class as there are few public housing projects as there are here in the East Coast. Even Nashville had more. And that brings me to Nashville. Their one acclaimed high school is Hume-Fogg, right at the top of the epicenter of Broadway, where that one mile of street is home to the cheap beer and cover music of honky tonks that drive the economic wheel of Nashville. The rest of them were unbelievably bad in every sense of the word. I still cannot believe what I experienced, heard and saw there and with that I move onto Jersey City schools. I have been only to two. I tried to get a sub gig a the single acclaimed High School, McNair, but that was canceled. But I look forward to getting in there one day. But it is no different here in the State that is number one for educational achievement and has the taxes in which to support it, but so far I got nothing as I came in during a pandemic and cannot say if that is a part of the problem or just that it turned the rock.

And as the rock turns, so have the numbers of students enrolling in College. The numbers are down in most places and have been declining for years, despite the push as well let’s face it, most cannot afford it. This week came the news that lender Navient, one of the nation’s largest student loan companies, has entered into a $1.85 billion settlement with a coalition of state attorneys general to resolve allegations that it steered borrowers into costly repayment plans and predatory loans. With that, let’s add another story about the Cartel of Ivy League schools that went all Varsity Blues on enrollment qualifications and admissions to favor the rich and privileged. Wow isn’t that shocking? No, not really. And of course we cannot not talk about Colleges without talking about their sports and teams and the costs of doing business with regards to higher education. This is a story about a College town where the Athletics Department make the money and the rest of the school and students get by on way less. Not shocking it is the South, they drive that machine like it is a chance to redo the Civil War and once again it is to the detriment of the Poor and those of Color.

Next up on the hysteria list is the Omnicom variant, what is now version 4.0 of Covid-19. Well entering year three has only ratched up the rage and divisiveness now over Boosters and how often we need them, along with the shortage of testing sites/kits and type of masks and access and affordability of them both. Well if you got the money I got the time and in my bathroom a nice stockpile of tests and types (lab vs rapid) and a variation of K95 masks that I use interspersed with regular surgical or cotton depending upon the type and length of use. Again I read voraciously and have found out that once again not wrong, you have about 15-30 minutes with and without masks before risk of infection occurs. So just fucking mask up properly, and that means covering your nose. Folks that is the entry point and that seems to be part of the problem. That and the insatiable need to push the envelope by going on cruises, vacations, large parties and hanging out in bars. The thought of delayed gratification and careful parsing out of risk oriented behaviors that you can choose from seems to be oblivious to many. There is a middle ground between a monastic life and one full tilt boogie.

What is sad. Tragic. Grim. Pathetic (yes folks I know those are fragments which I use as a literary device) is that the idea of boosting oneself every four months to somehow offset the effects of a disease that morphs more times than a creature in science fiction is going to do the trick of saving the world. And of course this directive is all coming from Big Pharma who have no skin in the game at all, right? And with that here is where I may agree with some who say the science is not all there. I am not sure that putting my aging white cells into overdrive every few months will do a body good and that does concern me. I will stick with the masks and monastic life thanks and just be willing to do so twice a year as Covid is not like a flu with a seasonal life span. But then that is it, I already paid for one set of vaccines and is the government going to continue picking up the tab for the next three years until I turn 65? Then they have to.

So we make changes and adapt, like Covid, but even I have met some tests to make me wonder how long I too can go on like this. I live a fairly altered life with some theater and opera as my one source of activity that I still pursue. But even that is beginning to take a turn and as I have tentatively nine shows left on my schedule I am not sure I am all that thrilled to go. The audiences are highly stressed and the theaters are packed and yet it seems as if we are all there to not get entertained and enjoy ourselves but to prove a point or still get a FOMO moment in. That may be why I am seeing productions close early and others altering or delaying productions. Mrs. Doubtfire had mixed reviews but is the kind of show that draws families and tourists. It was shut briefly over Covid, re-openend but to small houses. I read numerous complaints on a Reddit site about the audience having kids and that they were loud and annoying. Well kids don’t go on Thursday night and if you want to help them go then not at a matinee. Then with that, to Kill a Mockingbird is going on a hiatus and opening up at a smaller theater in June at The Belasco; this theater is the home of one of the most transcendent musicals I have seen this year, The Girl from the North Country. A seatmate looked at me during the intermission and was amazed at the quality of beauty of this work set to the catalog of Bob Dylan. They hope to reopen later. I doubt it and yes it opened prior to the pandemic had rave reviews but see times and tastes changes and the limited shows are packing houses as they fill the MUST SEE classification and that is not just something sustainable. It is time to examine pay-per-view, or live stream to enable theater to continue. I have done both and they are fine ways to see the performances, particularly the two I saw from here. Clyde’s, which is “amusing” but not 100 buck amusing. And the other was a British play with Dominic Gleeson and to say weird would be insufficient and not worth the hour commute to Brooklyn, so the cost was significantly less and in both cases I can wear PJ’s and have a glass of wine, two things I cannot do on Broadway. Even the wine is gone now. So the last thing I need is a scolding glaring New Yorker admonishing me or others for singing along, dancing or other things that inspire audiences. Jagged Little Pill was another casualty for just that, a moderate type of juke box musical with a way better story line also closed. And more have also followed despite reviews but are just not the type that can be supported by the “theater crowd.”

And lastly the idea that we are going to come out of this whole is an utterly absurd notion. We are not. We have a media blaring on about inflation, with the great resignation myth still pumping up the volume, and the days of hoarding are back and may explain some of those grocery shelves bare. I recall the early days of Covid and this again is way too similar. Wages have to increase we are clear about that and there are more pushes to Unionize in Starbucks and again at Amazon. Stores are altering hours and yes restaurants are closing. I still believe that part of the CDC decision that quarantining for only 5 days came out of the idea of workers shortages due to the virus spread being back, but there was no science to defend the idea of first 14, then 10 and now 5. I remember it all and still want to know exactly the length of time one is contagious from point of infection. They have also changed the idea of contraction to infection to 12-24 hours. They actually peddled the idea at one point it was up to 14 days. Folks I never heard of anyone getting sick two weeks later after exposure, I did hear of it within days, I assume and believe 3, a common feature among most viruses. But with the lack of contact tracing and tracking it just was another throw this out there til we figure it out. Clearly three years in we have not.

As for the supply chain woes there are multiple factors here. China for one is still on Covid zero with them locking down entire cities as they prepare for the Olympics in February. And with that manufacturing is down, shipping has been struggling with a lack of containers clearing blocked ports, leading some retailers to develop their own direct line to handle this. Tesla is a good example of running your own chain of command as they have had none of the problems American automakers have faced. But we need to also examine this obsessive nature to have and buy things constantly. I hate my sofa it was a bad purchase but I live with it and when the time comes I will replace it. I can do that with clothes as well I need to have things that fit but I know that in reality I can do without 5 black turtlenecks. We are bored, I get it, I really do but like eating out and traveling I am trying to find some reasonable balance.

We have no idea when this will end, we have little willpower and more importantly a lack of clear leadership and effective communication that enables people to make rational decisions, to take clear action and willing to sacrifice some privileges in which to at least adapt and develop better courses of actions in which to accommodate a virus that is not going anywhere anytime soon.

Got Woke?

I am a great proponent of teaching about the history of race and the dynamics of how that contributed towards our current culture and the role it plays in income inequality, from redlining that prohibited Black families to buy homes and build equity which is a major role in family wealth; public versus private education and the role of funding K-12 to Colleges that led to discriminatory practices in how well a school could educate their students; Affirmative action, voting rights, equal rights for women and of course LGBQT history of their rights as well. The debate on Immigration and of course Slavery and how even today we continue to have a form of indentured servitude with undocumented workers. All of these things are actually ongoing so it is living history and the past acts of laws and misdeeds by many politicians including interning Japanese during WWII, the Chinese Exclusionary Acts, the role of American Natives and how we have done damage to their culture and identity are all part of what is under the umbrella of Critical Race Theory. Sadly it is not, it is defined by two colors, black and white, and with that we have a major problem right there. Our history is not defined solely by those two races and should not be defined to only those and with that even within that there are perspectives that run contrary to the collective belief.

I deeply respect John McWhorter and his views regarding Anti Racism theory has been well documented and has often been quite the lightening rod for many who are seeking to make this curriculum a requirement in all schools, both K-12 to College. This has also escalated to smack down on his blog and of course the personal often colors the professional when criticizing any theory which is what Anti-Racism is. It is not a science, a defined mental health issue nor anything more than one persons perspective on race, much like DiAngelo’s thoughts on race that claim white fragility is why racism persists. There are theories on the issue of Caste and its role in why Black economics are affected by persisting racism and that theory too can be extended across the board when it comes to economic inequality that meritocracy works, that yes one can rise above ones class or race. Allowing, no really it is permitting, some to elevate in society easier than others. Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton to me clearly demonstrate that and the bookend is Barack and Michelle Obama. So yes folks the mythical Unicorn of Meritocracy can exist, just not that often, where it is less about entertainment or sports as the avenue in which to advance.

So when I read the article below about the well off and historically white institutions of education in New York and their attempt to teach wokeness I did laugh. As I have said there is little room in liberal bastions for dissent despite their otherwise saying to the contrary. Drink the kool-aid, shut your mouth and say, thanks I love overly sweet drinks. I have learned that the most political profession is not actually politics but education. Despite the fact that public education is transparent with regards to salary, educational requirements, professional expectations and of course professional growth it is is also the most behind closed doors one that I have ever experienced. The endless revolving doors of Superintendents, Administrators, School Boards along with the political climate in the mainstream, and of course the endless onslaught of theories and concepts created in the halls of ivory (STEM, Restorative Justice). Follow the money backing said theories become the latest and greatest idea since sliced bread. Common Core anyone? And how these affect the classroom and only been measured less in tests but in exhaustion. Covid has opened that Pandora’s Box and has now enabled many to see, if not experience, first hand the challenges of what it takes to manage a classroom of diverse and not so diverse bodies.

But the rich are different and while they espouse egalitarianism they are the most dogmatic when it comes to protecting their own and their way of life. Nurture versus nature matters most and in turn they profess to care but they really on care about their own. Public face versus private face and that anyone who thinks faces of color are experts at code switching, need to spend more time with wealthy as they are experts at it. They invented it, they patented it and they get it. How do you think the rest of us learned it? We had to to survive.

So below is the story of the rich, the elite and their schools in teaching Critical Race Theory. The stories of the rednecks and others protesting this only demonstrates the method in which they do so, the rich are different. They will do it, they will take no one else’s opinions or regard any criticism as this is the way it is to be done. They actually don’t care but on surface it appears they do. And the article mentions the issues over class but not just those ones exhibited by the privileged Whites, but Black families as well. But when you hear only one voice you hear nothing and learn even less. And again, swallow the tea, drink the kool aid as it is like a cult just with better style.

New York’s Private Schools Tackle White Privilege. It Has Not Been Easy.

In this world — where tuition runs as high as $58,000 — the topic has become flammable. Parents, faculty, students and alumni have all entered the fray.

By Michael Powell The New York Times August 27 2021

Several years back Grace Church School, an elite private school in Manhattan, embraced an antiracist mission and sought to have students and teachers wrestle with whiteness, racial privilege and bias.

Teachers and students were periodically separated into groups by race, gender and ethnicity. In February 2021, Paul Rossi, a math teacher, and what the school called his “white-identifying” group, met with a white consultant, who displayed a slide that named supposed characteristics of white supremacy. These included individualism, worship of the written word and objectivity.

Mr. Rossi said he felt a twist in his stomach. “Objectivity?” he told the consultant, according to a transcript. “Human attributes are being reduced to racial traits.”

As you look at this list, the consultant asked, are you having “white feelings”?

“What,” Mr. Rossi asked, “makes a feeling ‘white’?”

Some of the high school students then echoed his objections. “I’m so exhausted with being reduced to my race,” a girl said. “The first step of antiracism is to racialize every single dimension of my identity.” Another girl added: “Fighting indoctrination with indoctrination can be dangerous.”

This modest revolt proved fateful. A school official reprimanded Mr. Rossi, accusing him of “creating a neurological imbalance” in students, according to a recording of the conversation. A few days later the head of school wrote a statement and directed teachers to read it aloud in classes.

“When someone breaches our professional norms,” the statement read in part, “the response includes a warning in their permanent file that a further incident of unprofessional conduct could result in dismissal.”

This is another dispatch from America’s cultural conflicts over schools, this time from a rarefied bubble. Elite private schools from Los Angeles to Washington, D.C., from Boston to Columbus, Ohio, have embraced a mission to end racism by challenging white privilege. A sizable group of parents and teachers say the schools have taken it too far — and enforced suffocating and destructive groupthink on students.

This is nowhere more true than in New York City’s tony forest of private schools.

Stirred by the surge of activism around racism, Black alumni have shared tales of isolation, insensitivity and racism during school days.

And many private school administrators have tried to reimagine their schools as antiracist institutions, which means, loosely, a school that is actively opposed to any manifestation of racism.

This conflict plays out amid the high peaks of American economic inequality. Tuition at many of New York’s private schools hovers between $53,000 and $58,000, the most expensive tab in the nation. Many heads of school make between $580,000 to more than $1.1 million.

At a time when some public schools are battling over whether to even teach aspects of American history, private school administrators portray uprooting racial bias as morally urgent and demanding of reiteration. Some steps are practical: They have added Black, Latino and Asian authors, and expanded course offerings to better encompass America and the world in its complications.

Other steps are much more personal. The interim head of the Dalton School, Ellen Stein, who is white, spoke five years ago of writing a racial biography of herself to better understand biases and to communicate with “other races.” The Brearley School declared itself an antiracist school with mandatory antiracism training for parents, faculty and trustees and affirmed the importance of meeting regularly in groups that bring together people who share a common race or gender.

Kindergarten students at Riverdale Country School in the Bronx are taught to identify their skin color by mixing paint colors. The lower school chief in an email last year instructed parents to avoid talk of colorblindness and “acknowledge racial differences.”Sign Up for The Great Read  Every weekday, we recommend one piece of exceptional writing from The Times — a narrative or essay that takes you someplace you might not expect to go. Get it sent to your inbox.

Private school leaders, along with diversity consultants, say these approaches reflect current research about confronting racism and stamping out privilege.

“There’s always the same resistance — ‘Oh my God, you’re going too far,’” said Martha Haakmat, a Black diversity consultant who serves on the board of Brearley. “We just want to teach kids about the systems that create inequity in society and empower them rather than reinforcing systems of oppression.”

Studies show that very young children, she said, are aware of skin color. Better to address it — “Yes, that woman has Black skin. What do you think of that?” — than to let children view white skin as the baseline.

More broadly, Ms. Haakmat said, private schools need to sidestep white old boy networks in hiring and integrate antiracism into the curriculum: If you teach statistics, why not touch on economic and racial inequality? Or use biology classes to teach of eugenics and how race has framed the way we think of humans? That, she said, “is thoughtful antiracism.”

Critics, a mixed lot of parents and teachers, argue that aspects of the new curriculums edge toward recreating the racially segregated spaces of an earlier age. They say the insistent emphasis on skin color and race is reductive and some teenagers learn to adopt the language of antiracism and wield it against peers.

The nerves of some parents were not soothed when more than 100 teachers and staff members applauded Dalton’s antiracism curriculum and proposed two dozen steps to extend it, including calling on the school to abolish any advanced course in which Black students performed worse than students who are not Black.

A group of Dalton parents wrote their own letter to the school this year: “We have spoken with dozens of families of all colors and backgrounds who are in shock and looking for an alternative school.”

This upswell of parental anger, fed also by discontent with Dalton’s decision to teach only online last fall, led the head of school, Jim Best, who is white, to leave on July 1. Dalton’s diversity chief resigned under fire in February.

Bion Bartning, who notes that his heritage is a mix of Jewish, Mexican and Yaqui tribe, pulled his children out of Riverdale and created a foundation to argue against this sort of antiracist education. “The insistence on teaching race consciousness is a fundamental shift into a sort of tribalism,” he said.

No head of school agreed to an interview. Those at Dalton, Riverdale and Grace Church answered some questions by email. Several dozen faculty members declined interviews; in the end six spoke only on the condition of anonymity, for fear of upsetting employers. A dozen parents at five schools agreed to interviews, only one on the record.

For parents to speak out, said a white mother of private school children, was laden with risk. “People and companies are petrified of being labeled racists,” she said. “If you work at an elite Wall Street firm and speak out, a top partner will tell you to shut up.”

Another parent framed the primal class stakes: Wealthy parents plot and compete to get a child into a private school secure in the knowledge that education married to social connections will ease the way into an elite college and a gilded career. A letter or call from the counselor at a top private school can work wonders with college admissions offices.

Why risk all that?

Responding to Painful Stories

The stories make for disturbing reading. In the wake of the police killing of George Floyd, Black private school alumni formed Instagram accounts: @blackattrinity, @blackatdalton, @blackatbrearley, @blackatandover and @blackatsidwellfriends.

The posts are anonymous and difficult to fact-check. But the ache and hurt are inescapable. A Black student recalled a white peer who told him Dalton “wasn’t made for people like you anyway.” A Black graduate of Columbia Grammar & Preparatory School recalled wealthy white classmates who complained Black students only got into certain colleges because of their race. A Black Brearley graduate wrote of being conditioned to believe “white skin, straight hair, a skinny body and money was the only way I could be right in this world.”

Stories come laden with complication. Students wrote of favorite teachers and treasured experiences. And there were traces of class anger. A Black working-class parent at Trinity School wrote that wealthy Black families dominated the Black affinity group and excluded her child.

These kinds of stories, taken together with shifts in the culture around racism, persuaded private school leaders to double down on antiracist education. Such efforts extend back more than four decades.

“As schools got used to diversity they realized it enriched education for all students,” said Ms. Haakmat, the consultant. “But these schools were still way white.”

New York’s private schools declined to provide the demographic breakdowns that are required of public schools. Riverdale and Trinity officials say about 40 percent of students identify as of color, a quite broad definition; Grace officials say 33 percent of students hail from “diverse backgrounds”; Dalton said only that it had a “strong commitment to being intentionally diverse.” Riverdale’s head of school, Dominic Randolph, said a precise count was complicated by the number of families identifying as multiracial.

Numbers compiled by the Guild of Independent Schools of New York City showed that the percentage of students in elite private schools who identified as Black or Latino remained static since 2013, hovering at a combined 12 percent; Black and Latino residents constitute more than 50 percent of the city’s population.

Lisa Johnson is a graduate of a private school in Atlanta and heads Private School Village, a Los Angeles-based organization for Black families. “They love to pitch you on diversity,” she said. “Then your child is one of two Blacks in a class and you think, ‘Huh, how do they define diversity without crystal-clear data?’”

Chloé Valdary, a Black diversity consultant who diverges from her peers and is critical of aspects of antiracist education, noted that heated rhetoric rarely challenged the status quo. “Antiracism sidesteps income inequality and doesn’t actually threaten the elite at all,” she said.

Several teachers spoke of a performance-like quality to heated rhetoric on antiracism and pointed by way of example to Dalton, which throws an annual diversity conference that attracts trustees, parents and donors from 30 private schools. The conference this May carried intrigue, with Dalton’s head of school, Mr. Best, speaking of his confusion at being pushed out, saying, “No one here, including me, has the full story.”

Mr. Best introduced the keynote speaker, Rodney Glasgow, a Black diversity consultant who leads a private Quaker school in Maryland. Mr. Glasgow, a popular speaker on the private school circuit, promptly laid waste to that world, describing it as laden with “insidious” whiteness and “built to replicate the plantation mentality.”

Mr. Glasgow ended with a flourish, comparing those Dalton parents who pushed out Mr. Best to what he described as the white supremacists who invaded the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. Dalton featured his speech prominently on its website until questions arose. It has since been removed.

The Grace School Mission

Paul Rossi and Grace Church School’s journey into antiracist education offers a window into its complexities. Mr. Rossi, 52, changed careers in his early 40s, and found at Grace — an Episcopal school with liberal values — a place he adored. He taught math and classes on existentialism and Stoic philosophy. Records show he received strong annual evaluations and was described as a natural teacher.

Slowly change came. The head of school, George P. Davison, who is white and has steered Grace for many years, pinpointed the moment his school embraced an antiracist mission.

“Grace began using the language of antiracism in 2015 as part of our efforts to foster a sense of belonging,” he wrote in response to The New York Times. “It means believing that racism is real, that opposing it requires active engagement and that our community and curriculum are enriched when we aren’t blind to race’s influence.”

Grace, he wrote, incorporated the language of critical race theory but did not rest upon that foundation. He emphasized that the school avoided using shame around race.

Mr. Rossi, along with two teachers who described themselves as progressives and asked for anonymity, was skeptical. The teachers acknowledged that quite a few colleagues appeared to support the new curriculum and they spoke of sustained pressure to demonstrate acceptance of the language of antiracism.

Last year, the @blackatgrace Instagram account anonymously accused a female administrator of once placing derogatory information in a Black student’s file. A teacher circulated a petition demanding her firing.

Another teacher grew worried; he had not known of the petition and feared the absence of his signature would be taken as a sign of his insensitivity. “I thought to myself: We’ve entered a culture of denunciation,” Mr. Rossi said. “We don’t just denounce but if we don’t do it fast enough, we could be denounced.”

Pressure to join affinity groups went “beyond ‘highly encouraged,’” teachers said. A Latino couple asked a teacher to stop pressuring their daughter, who did not want to join the Latino one.

Grace administrators agreed to demands to seek more diverse faculty; it is largely white.

With the election of Donald J. Trump, teachers said, permissible disagreement narrowed markedly. Mr. Rossi recalled some students in his “The Art of Persuasion” class hankered for contrarian readings outside what he called the “Grace political bubble.” So last autumn he proposed a work by Glenn Loury, a well-known economist at Brown University and a Black man with conservative leanings.

An administrator, Hugo Mahabir, whose family has roots in Trinidad, blocked that. He wrote in an email to Mr. Rossi that Mr. Loury’s argument — delivered to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology economics faculty — “rings hollow,” and that to give students a Black conservative view on race might “confuse and/or enflame students.” Mr. Mahabir did not respond to requests for comment.

The transcript of the February session with Mr. Rossi’s white affinity group revealed a tense, probing discussion, with teachers and students found on either side of various questions. Toward the end, the dean of student life, Ilana Laurence, offered thanks: “As uncomfortable as Mr. Rossi may have made many people here, I firmly believe that our conversation would not ever have been nearly as rich and thought-provoking.”

This drew support from the consultant, Emily Schorr Lesnick, who ran the affinity session. At a faculty meeting a few days later, she noted that Mr. Rossi and fellow teachers modeled an intelligent discussion.

“I have been in lots of spaces with adults, with students around antiracist work,” she said, where white people are “kind of just saying things and going through the motions and this was not that space, and I am so so grateful.” Ms. Schorr Lesnick, who is white, did not respond to a request for an interview.

That air of congratulation dissipated. Soon Mr. Rossi talked with Mr. Davison, the school head, about the dim shape of his future. He secretly recorded that conversation.

It offered a surprise. “The fact is that I’m agreeing with you that there has been a demonization,” Mr. Davison told the teacher. “I also have grave doubts about some of the doctrinaire stuff that gets spouted at us in the name of antiracist.”

Mr. Davison said he was worried students were made to feel shame because of race. “We’re demonizing white people for being born,” he said, adding later, “We’re using language that makes them feel less than, for nothing that they are personally responsible.”

Mr. Rossi wrote of his case on the Substack site of the writer Bari Weiss, a former Times Opinion editor. In an email to Mr. Rossi, Mr. Davison claimed he was misquoted. The teacher later released recorded excerpts from that conversation, after which Grace claimed that the quotes lacked context.

Mr. Rossi was denounced at Grace and in private school circles. He rejoined that he was trapped, accused of racial insensitivity and in danger of losing his job.

This drama occurred against a backdrop of tension at the school. Months earlier, nine Black students demanded that classes be called off in the wake of Mr. Floyd’s death. They said peers were “voicing their white opinions about how Black and brown people should protest.”

The Grace Gazette, the school newspaper, surveyed 111 students and staff this spring of all backgrounds about free speech.

By a margin of about 48 percent to 43 percent, respondents said they were uncomfortable expressing dissenting opinions. And 35 percent said they had practiced “wokeness” to protect their reputations. “There is no viewpoint diversity on race,” a student wrote, “because everyone is expected to view things the same way.”

An Uncertain Future

The pushback against antiracism education has taken on aspects of an ideological uprising. In Boston, a new group, Parents United, has entered the fight with New England’s private schools. Mr. Bartning, the former Riverdale parent, established the Foundation Against Intolerance & Racism, with a large board that includes the academic and writer Steven Pinker; the human rights activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali; the former Fox newscaster Megyn Kelly; and Mr. Loury, the economist at Brown. Mr. Rossi works with this foundation.

Grace Church School appointed a task force to re-examine its antiracist teachings.

But the schools seem unlikely to change their approach to educating students on race. And opponents face daunting challenges. Powerful trustees say they support the schools, and administrators sound steeled for the argument. Tom Taylor, the head of Riverdale’s Upper School, who is white, recently published an academic article on race and private schools. He, too, is a product of such schools.

Private schools perpetuate whiteness, he wrote, and must pursue an “antiracist, decolonizing and culturally affirming” agenda, with no obligation to educate those who resist. “Private schools who find parents unwilling to accept moves toward a culturally responsible school are free to draw a line,” he wrote.

Mr. Rossi, the Grace schoolteacher, will watch from the outside. Grace Church School offered him a contract if he participated in “restorative practices” for the supposed harm done to students of color. Grace officials did not explain what that would entail.

Soon after, Mr. Rossi and the school parted ways. “It’s no longer the school I loved,” he said.

Blame the Patriarchy

I wrote yesterday about how particularly White Feminism is in fact as judgmental, racist and discriminatory as any white supremacist group as they use their moral superiority to patronize and demoralize anyone who refuses to subscribe and follow the script. The lack of diverse voices ( a wide swath largely of class and color) and of course voices that offer disagreement (see the current issues about Times Up) often enable, if not further, the belief that the sole course of action is right. And largely is that it is all about gender and in turn believing that one gender is morally superior over another. See the White Supremacist similarity? And with that women of color, women who are not American born are often equally subjugated and dismissed with regards to their complaints, blaming said failures on again intrinsic behaviors and not extrinsic factors that block access. What is the untold secret is that many of these women who have attained a place or position of authority that they did not bypass traditional pathways, networks, or accomplish said success without (usually) a white male mentor who either fucked them, or had some type of father dynamic in place in which to foster and develop the relationship that enabled the same women to have both access and availability to powerful people and positions. There are some women who have made success without male influence but they also had a large cohort of other women who embraced and encouraged them, as one can look to the early days of Feminism that arose in the 60s, much like Civil Rights it is a movement over a cause that enables if not encourages it, but today there are few if any women who have not found their place in society secured by either marriage or from birth.

And this brings me to the story of Elizabeth Holmes of Theranos fame and infamy. The story of her fraud and duplicity in rising the company to amazing heights gives illustration to the ability to con. This woman conned many successful and well known men and Betsey DeVos (not a challenge there intellectually as we have come to know) into investing into her company based on an idea. This is the foundation of the Valley, the BIG IDEA, which in many cases are often just BIG LIES passed off as ideas and plans, see Adam Neumann of We Work as another example of this kind of P.T. Barnum bullshit in the land of cash and gravy. But the road to riches is paved with lies and exaggerations, and of course, men chest thumping and dick swinging. And then came Elizabeth with her contrived deep voice, blonde hair and black turtlenecks it was still easy being a child who extrinsically demonstrated the idea of white privilege and still now breaking the glass ceiling that someone less glamorous like say, Hillary Clinton, failed to do. But she managed to do it and for awhile rode that ride like a child at a carnival. And then it was a man, a man from the Wall Street Journal who began to ask questions thanks to another young man and a young woman who too had questions and they began to blow some whistles. But this kind of shit can only be covered up so long before the stink rises and we have seen this with many men of late, Scott Rudin, Andrew Cuomo come to mind, but this is still toxic regardless of who shat it. But what is fascinating is how they never admitted guilt or truly apologized they just retreated and we await to see their inevitable return or not, hey whatever.

But, today as she is prepping for her trial, Elizabeth’s success ladder has collapsed and now in an attempt at redemption is doing what anyone does best in these times, BLAME SOMEONE ELSE. Ah yes that is always a good idea and saying one is a victim of domestic violence is a good defense when any other possible one has been exhausted. Not only is it tragic, this is a horrific notion that further pushes women back into the professional closet. We are either fucking our way to the top or being raped while at the bottom, it is an either/or neither/nor choice that only once again seems to validate the idea that women are stupid manipulative bitches. One of these days Alice!

Elizabeth Holmes expected to argue she suffered abuse from ex-boyfriend during Theranos trial

Unsealed documents in the high-profile case that begins with jury selection Aug. 31 include accusations against Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani of “essentially dominating her and erasing her capacity to make decisions.”

By Jay Greene and Rachel Lerman The Washington Post August 29, 2021

Former Theranos chief executive Elizabeth Holmes is likely to argue in her criminal trial that abuse by her ex-boyfriend, who was the company’s president, rendered her incapable of making her own decisions, according to documents unsealed in the case early Saturday morning.

Holmes, who started Theranos when she was a 19-year-old student at Stanford University, is charged with 10 counts of wire fraud and two counts of conspiracy to commit wire fraud for allegedly defrauding investors and patients in connection to her failed blood-testing firm. Jury selection is scheduled to begin on Aug. 31, with the trial starting Sept. 8.

The unusual defense strategy in one the highest-profile corporate trials in years offers clearer details on how Holmes plans to frame the implosion of a company that was once one of the industry’s start-up darlings. Holmes graced magazine covers and regularly appeared on business television programs while Theranos took in hundreds of millions of dollars from household-name investors such as Rupert Murdoch and Betsy DeVos. But her fall, after a 2015 Wall Street Journal investigation showed the company’s technology was unreliable, led to the many claims of fraud.

Several of the newly unsealed documents relate to the successful efforts by Holmes’s ex-boyfriend, Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani, to separate his trial from hers. Holmes’s plans to argue intimate partner violence as a defense would prevent him from receiving a fair trial if the cases were joined, Balwani’s lawyers argued in the documents.

One unsealed Balwani filing from February notes the strategy: “Ms. Holmes plans to introduce evidence that Mr. Balwani verbally disparaged her and withdrew ‘affection if she displeased him’; controlled what she ate, how she dressed, how much money she could spend, who she could interact with — essentially dominating her and erasing her capacity to make decisions.”

Holmes’s lawyers introduced the possible defense in December, noting that it might call an expert witness to testify about “whether and how Ms. Holmes’ relationship with Mr. Balwani was consistent with intimate partner abuse,” and also attest to “Ms. Holmes’ particular vulnerability to an abusive relationship.” In a separate filing, Holmes’s lawyers note that it is “highly likely” Holmes will introduce evidence of “intimate partner abuse.”

Holmes’s filings provide some detail into her allegations of abuse. She alleges that Balwani monitored her calls, texts and email messages, that he threw “hard, sharp objects” at her, and that he restricted her sleep and monitored her movements, among other charges.ADVERTISING

In his legal response, Balwani’s lawyers disputed Holmes’s abuse claims, arguing they are “deeply offensive to Mr. Balwani, devastating personally to him, and highly and unfairly prejudicial to his defense of this case.”

The filings also answer a question about which has been widely speculated, whether Holmes will testify in her own defense, something that often is a perilous legal strategy because it opens a defendant up to cross-examination by prosecutors. The apparent answer is yes.

“Ms. Holmes is likely to testify herself to the reasons why she believed, relied on, and deferred to Mr. Balwani,” according to one of her legal filings in February.

Court documents had previously indicated that Holmes was evaluated by a psychologist who specializes in violence against women and interpersonal violence, leading to speculation that her attorneys could mount a so-called “mental defect” defense. The government also asked, and was granted, the chance to have Holmes evaluated by medical professionals they appointed.https://85c90c650def3b002604d56bc0e8515c.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-38/html/container.html

The documents were unsealed after a lawyer for Dow Jones, the parent company of the Wall Street Journal, asked the court to make them public. Balwani’s lawyers opposed the unsealing, and Holmes’s lawyers asked the judge to wait longer before making them public.

Balwani was initially charged with Holmes, but the two later had their cases separated. His trial is scheduled to begin in January. The unsealed documents also show that Balwani requested to be tried first. And they show that the government opposed severing the trial.

Theranos attempted to develop miniature lab technology, which sometimes was called the “Edison,” that could quickly and inexpensively run hundreds of tests from just a couple of drops of blood collected after pricking a finger. But investigations led by reporting from the Journal revealed severe dysfunction within the young company and technology that was erratic and unreliable.

Theranos was actually using traditional lab equipment, made by outside companies, to run most tests, the Journal’s reporting showed. And scientists within the company were uneasy about how often the company’s machine seemed to give unreliable results.

Holmes launched Theranos in 2003 and grew it to about 800 employees and a valuation of $9 billion before it ultimately collapsed in 2018. In a chaotic period after the Journal’s bombshell reports were published, partners including Safeway and Walgreens dissolved deals with the company.

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which oversees clinical labs, found deficiencies at the company’s lab. Theranos eventually settled with the agency and agreed not to operate any clinical labs for two years. Holmes also settled with the Securities and Exchange Commission over fraud allegations, and was barred from serving as a director or officer of a public company for a decade.

Judge Edward J. Davila, of the federal court in the Northern District of California, said during a hearing Thursday that he thought it wise to unseal the documents before potential jurors are brought in to be questioned next week. That way, lawyers could ask them if they had seen any recent media coverage of the case, he said.

Holmes’s lawyers had asked that the unsealing be delayed until after jurors had been chosen and directed not to read media items.

All Aboard

I just returned from catching Kings of Leon in Bridgeport Connecticut. Okay, I was shocked how mellow Bridgeport was after being warned. Yes like all the towns I have been to this summer, Portland Maine, Raleigh North Carolina, Newport/Providence Rhode Island, there are problems that are clearly Covid centered. The lack of coffee after 3pm in Providence right there was an issue and that many restaurants have limited hours/days so finding food was often challenging, but for the record after the Tony Bennett show in Manhattan that was also a problem, and this is again Manhattan. It was a choice of missing another train or just getting home at a reasonable hour, I chose the latter. So Covid has done more to kill not just people but industry as well.

But Bridgeport has or had a reputation that I simply waited until I got there to find out what the what was there. This is from the Atlantic, The Epicenter of American Inequality, that discusses how the larger metro areas in the region are now plagued with poverty and in turn all that encompasses that issue – violence, crime and deterioration. And to further understand the problems that it as well as New Haven, home to Yale folks, faces are largely due to an antiquated manner of funding and no desire to change the channel when it comes to that as it requires a massive overhaul, as this explains. And with that I did visit New Haven a city with two downtown’s; the fake one in the center of the Yale campus and the real one which is divided by a park and a whole lot of problems. I came to the city via the Union Station and with that did not find those problems immediately upon arrival, thanks to work in the area, I had to detour and I ended up following (I walked the route), the free shuttle bus which takes you from Union Station to the other downtown. I can only imagine what the main station at State street is like given what I experienced there. The families of privilege who send their children to Yale likely never see any of it and with that they can justify the expense of sending them to the institution that has such illustrious graduates as George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Brett Kavanaugh. Or how about Ron DeSantis! Glen Beck! My god what a trove of douches this is not something I would be proud of telling folks of that alumni list. And with that it also explains quite a bit about the concept of White Privilege. However, I don’t discredit the school of Drama, as that is an utterly distinctly different college of elite and, well , they are theater people, so thanks Meryl.

Interesting that a school can have two universes or universities that simultaneously co-exist with no overlap what.so.ever. But I actually found New Haven quite sketchy as I was walking down a street and looking at the architecture and a Black man said behind me, “Excuse me Ma’am I am behind you and don’t want to frighten you.” WHAT? If you are walking down the street in the middle of the day and you pass someone do you announce yourself? And the two men landscapers across the street just busted out laughing as they saw me do a 360 to see what the fuck was going on. I just said, “You have nothing to excuse as unless you are asking me for directions, money or a date which all would be in the negative, I don’t give a shit about you walking.” And the two men continued to laugh and said, “We would not let anything happen to you.” So in other words the guy did have an agenda, realized he was being watched and kept walking. Did I feel safe. No. I boogied out of the area and followed the man for as long as I could to keep an eye on him. New Haven is not safe.

As for Bridgeport I stayed at a Holiday Inn my room was cleaned and the gym amazing, the bar clean and welcoming and food fine. I ate at an overpriced old time steakhouse where the food was average and the place near empty so I paid for the privilege of being safe – from Covid. The new outdoor stadium where the Kings played is fantastic and an attempt to draw business to the area by salvaging an old baseball stadium which had been closed for years. There are several aging buildings, the old PT Barnum home which they had turned into a museum, now closed and many old theaters they are also restoring to build a larger entertainment option in the area. I had no complaints and would happily go there anytime to see another act. Sorry I will miss the Foo Fighters next month. That has to be better than being trapped INSIDE any facility at this time. Sorry folks but the Madison Square Garden show was badly enforced regarding vaxx status and I am not ready for that yet. Radio City had a better protocol and when Bill Clinton showed up that is all I needed to know about that to ensure my comfort level.

As a I travel I am not much of tourist as I have yet to research any of the area prior to going, I simply went to catch some music with the one caveat, it had to be outdoors. As for the regions vaxx rate that too mattered and any other options was the ability to walk to the stadium and back without effort. And with that I found myself fairly open to explore on my own and with no expectations and given that many sites are closed and on limited hours you need be. But the best thing of my travels is that I have become reliant upon Amtrak. And this has turned out to be the way to travel and truly experience a road trip without having to drive. Plus you can drink while sitting there, not a good idea in a car.

Amtrak is a favorite by our President Joe Biden and he has advocated it with his infrastructure bill and with this I can also see why. The train is fantastic and for now it will be my main source of travel simply because of ease of access and availability when it comes to finding routes that work. Costs are about the same and in regards to actual travel time oddly similar if you include traveling too and from the airport as that energy is lost as stations are in the heart of the city and your bags are with you so little time is wasted getting on or off. Again, this train thing is truly been an amazing eye awakening.

Below is an article about Amtrak and this is the time to ask if you can take a small trip to a nearby place just for the fun of it. I have found that train passengers are a way friendlier bunch, low on the drama and the Conductors are truly gems. I cannot wait for my next trip.

Train travel collapsed early in the pandemic, but a summer resurgence is offering a boost for Amtrak

A busier railroad has also presented challenges in enforcing a federal mask mandate

By Luz Lazo The Washington Post August 20 2021

More people have traveled by passenger rail this summer than any point since the start of the pandemic, signaling that trains are following airlines on a path to recovery despite a recent rise in coronavirus cases.

The latest numbers are the best news in nearly 18 months for Amtrak, which was hit hard by the pandemic and forced to rely on federal aid to stay afloat. More than 1.8 million people traveled by Amtrak in July — the busiest month since ridership plummeted earlier last year — building on June’s passenger count of 1.5 million.

The numbers represent a resurgence for America’s passenger railroad, coming on the heels of road traffic hitting pre-pandemic levels in much of the country and surging demand for air travel. Historically dependent on business travel in the Northeast Corridor, Amtrak is eyeing a mix of new customers, promotional fares and a message of pandemic-era safety to lure riders back.

A busier railroad during the summer months also has presented challenges in Amtrak’s ability to enforce a federal mask mandate aboard trains and in stations. Amtrak in recent months has seen a spike in incidents involving passengers refusing to comply.

Though cases of mask defiance on the rails don’t garner the same attention as disruptions in the skies, railroad officials said the confrontations have similarities.

“If we do have someone who’s difficult, we stop at the next station and we remove them,” said Roger Harris, Amtrak’s chief marketing and revenue officer. “And since we stop every 10 or 20 minutes, it’s not like landing a plane and it’s not as disruptive.”

For Amtrak, which saw ridership plummet 97 percent in the weeks after the pandemic, ensuring smooth operations and maintaining coronavirus safety protocols are key to luring back passengers.

The railroad has been slower than airlines in rebuilding ridership, partly because the busy Northeast Corridor relies on lucrative business travel, which continues to lag.

Amtrak’s strategy coming out of the pandemic has been to lure leisure travelers with ticket sales — a price structure that has proved key to the summer’s rebound. Seats on would-be empty trains, generally outside peak travel hours, are being sold at reduced pricesto a new set of passengers.

Passenger counts are also up for Amtrak’s premium Acela service, primarily used for corporate trips before the pandemic. Seats on Acela trains from D.C. to New York sold for as much as 70 percent below normal fares earlier this summer.

The promotions have added new life aboard Acela, where ridership last month was at 54 percent of July 2019 numbers despite the sluggish return to business travel. Harris said the July Fourth holiday, usually a slow weekend on the business class route, was busier than in 2019.

“We’ve been taking a more pragmatic view to this,” he said. “At times and days of the week where we know the trains won’t be full, the better use of that seat is to fill it with someone rather than have it to go empty.”

The company said it has attracted about 300,000 new customers a month while it is beginning to see previous customers return.

“We’re also getting younger customers because they’re the ones who tend to get more price sensitive,” Harris said. “And I think they were more comfortable with travel in the early parts of the pandemic and probably even now to a certain extent.”

A surge in coronavirus caseloads from the more transmissible delta variant in recent weeks has not had a large effect on rail travel, Amtrak officials said. Experts and travelers say that could stem from cities in the Northeast — where Amtrak has its largest presence — having higher vaccination rates than other parts of the country.

Some airlines in recent days have reported weaker bookings and increases in cancellations attributed to the delta variant. Southwest Airlines is among those projecting a downward trend that could extend to the fall, while the Transportation Security Administration on Tuesday recorded its lowest number of daily airport screenings since early June.

Amtrak said it has seen a modest increase in people using fare flexibility options to change travel dates in recent weeks.

Beth Osborne, director of the D.C.-based nonprofit advocacy group Transportation for America, said downs and ups are likely as long as spikes in coronavirus cases continue. The good news, she said, is the pandemic is leading companies such as Amtrak to rethink services to attract new types of travelers.

While a large share of the railroad’s services rely on East Coast business travel, the railroad has been marketing to new prospective customers, including running campaigns targeting Spanish-speakers and other minority communities.

“I really do think that Amtrak and the federal government has to do a better job of advertising how much is being done to make it safe,” said Osborne, who recently took the Acela on a family trip to New York.

Transit systems across the nation are being held to a higher standard of cleanliness, ventilation and public health, she said, noting that masks are required across transportation systems via a mandate by the TSA.

Passengers traveling by Amtrak also must submit a health questionnaire, answering questions such as whether they have experienced covid-19 symptoms within 24 hours of departure. And, the company’s 18,000 employees are required to be vaccinated or submit to weekly testing, effective Nov. 1.

William K. Bolan, 25, of Arlington, took the Northeast Regional train to Baltimore for a day trip earlier this month. He had not traveled by train since the pandemic began.

“I got tired of not being able to do anything and go anywhere,” he said. “I realized, ‘Wait a minute, I got no work, I got some money in my pocket, I’m going to do this.’ ”

Bolan said he is vaccinated and felt comfortable getting on the full train car Saturday morning.

“I know that they have safety measures in place, and I felt perfectly fine,” he said. And at $13 each way, he said, “it was very cheap for me.”

The surge in coronavirus caseloads has not given Ben Finzel pause to travel by train, but the McLean resident said he is growing more concerned about Amtrak’s ability to enforce mask mandates.

The frequent Amtrak traveler said he has seen more non compliant passengers during recent trips, including two who got on his train Sunday back to Washington. He said the two passed by Amtrak staff unmasked while in New York, but there was no mask enforcement effort.

“There are signs everywhere. The announcements on the train are great. It’s just the enforcement piece,” Finzel said. “I feel like if they are going to be great about making the announcements about [the rules], they have to also enforce them.”

Amtrak began to see a rise in issues with passengers refusing to wear masks around April. When states and cities began to lift restrictions this spring, some mask requirement signs in stations not owned by Amtrak were removed.

“People didn’t understand that you still had to wear it for transportation,” Harris said. “So there was a step where we had to go back in and reintroduce the idea.”

The TSA on Tuesday extended through January 2022 its order requiring people to wear masks in transportation settings, including at airports, on commercial aircraft, and on buses and trains, with few exceptions. The mandate has been in place since Feb. 2.

The TSA said this week that Amtrak provides the agency with information about passengers not abiding by the mask mandate, then TSA officials follow up with an investigation.

“A little more than 500 mask incidents have been reported to TSA from surface transportation providers,” the agency said in a statement. That includes reports from transit agencies across the nation, as well as Amtrak, but the agency did not provide a breakdown of incidents. By comparison, TSA said it has received about 3,900 reported incidents within aviation.

Amtrak did not provide details about mask-related incidents on trains, but said the company saw an increase in passenger removals — generally the penalty for those who refuse to abide by the mask rule — in April, May and June. There was a reduction in such cases in July, the company said.

The railroad is still operating about 25 percent fewer trains and it is not expected to return to pre-pandemic schedules until next year.

Finzel said he is glad to see service levels on the rebound. A public relations executive who traveled on the Acela this past weekend with his husband, Finzel said they have taken Amtrak a few times this year but haven’t boarded a plane since the pandemic began.

“It’s really convenient. It’s much easier,” he said. “And so far, I feel safer on a train than I do on a plane.”

Dishing the Dirt

The big announcement this week was the Gates Divorce. The Bezos one was one and done and she remarried within a year to a Teacher at the same private school, Lakeside, that Gates attended back in the day. Now will Melinda prove to be much like Mackenzie Scott and decide to change venture philanthropy in the way she and her former spouse did and embrace the more lassiez faire method Ms. Scott chose to with her billions? I doubt it. I barely heard a word about Ms. Scott and Bezos was famous for his lack of engagement with the community he lives and works, and only recently had began to donate some of the largess of Amazon into the community. Of course it was very much in the model of the other Ventue Philanthropists chose to, in a way that was of course to circle back to them either via a trained workforce or sufficient business interests. I call it the circle jerk of charity as it almost always White men with money doing what they do best – trickle down economics. But in this model was Melinda Gates who was in symbiosis with her soon to be former spouse. The Gates Foundation is an interesting one as they invest their business holdings, Cascade Investments, with their charitable donations. They are the largest farm landowner in the United States owning more than a 242,000 acres at a value of 690 Million. When asked why? He gave a non-answer. Ted Turner actually is number 2 of the Great White Chief who owns millions of acres. Why? Who the fuck knows. Jane Fonda, his ex wife might and she might not given her liberal leanings. I guess that was a hell of a pre-nup.

Which brings us back the Gates whose residential home is 66,000 square feet. So you could live together and never see each other given the scope and scale of how it is designed and functions. But when you are rich is enough ever enough? And on that note, the day the divorce was announced Bill transferred (or so we are reportedly told) 1.8 BILLION in stocks earlier that day. Hmmm tax reasons? I guess yes.

I have written about the Gates Foundation for many years on this blog and will likely do so, as my interest in them is less about them personally but financially and of course their role in some of their more outrageous integrations in public education; the Common Core is one such example of the ways the Gates have tried to reform education, marginalize professional Educators and Public Schools. As for their attempts at disease mitigation in Africa it too has had some serious problems but nothing that money cannot smooth over. But that has never stopped Bill and Melinda from ham fisting their values across the Globe, which may explain some of the odd conspiracy theories and the like when it came to Covid-19 and Vaccines. They have always had a check at the ready to ensure that influence is best peddled by the rich and white.

But what I am loving right now is that this divorce seems to be tied to another rich and white man – Jeffrey Epstein! Can I just say this is what I needed right now! Jeffrey Epstein the gift from the grave that keeps on giving!

Melinda Gates began divorce moves at time Bill’s meetings with Jeffrey Epstein revealed

Wife of world’s fourth-richest man explored options almost two years ago, roughly at time sex criminal Epstein died in jail

By Martin Pengelly Mon 10 May 2021 The Guardian

Melinda Gates reportedly began exploring options for divorce from Bill Gates almost two years ago, around the time the world’s fourth-richest man was revealed to have met many times with Jeffrey Epstein, the philanthropist and sex offender who killed himself in jail in 2019.

On Sunday, the Wall Street Journal cited “people familiar with the matter” and a former employee of the Gates Foundation who said Bill Gates’s dealings with Epstein were “one source of concern” for his wife.Advertisement

In October 2019, the New York Times reported that Epstein cultivated the acquaintance of rich and powerful men including the former president Bill Clinton.

But it said few “compared in prestige and power to the [then] world’s second-richest person, a brilliant and intensely private luminary: Bill Gates. And unlike many others, Mr Gates started the relationship after Mr Epstein was convicted of sex crimes.”

In 2008, Epstein reached a deal with authorities and was sentenced to 13 months confinement for soliciting prostitution from underage girls. The conditions of the deal were a source of controversy 11 years later, when Epstein was charged with sex trafficking. Found dead in a New York jail, he was deemed to have killed himself.

Earlier this week, the Daily Beast reported that Melinda Gates warned her husband about associating with Epstein in 2013. The Wall Street Journal cited a former employee of the Gates Foundation who said relationships between the two men and other Gates employees continued after that warning.

The Journal said court documents showed that Melinda Gates spoke with legal advisers a number of times around publication of the New York Times story in 2019.

A spokesman for Bill Gates told the Journal he stood by a statement about Epstein given to the paper that year: “I met him. I didn’t have any business relationship or friendship with him.”

Bill and Melinda Gates announced their divorce on Twitter last week.

“After a great deal of thought and a lot of work on our relationship, we have made the decision to end our marriage,” they said. “We have raised three incredible children and built a foundation that works all over the world to enable all people to lead healthy, productive lives.”

The couple, who were married in 1994, have reportedly agreed to divide their assets. According to Forbes, Bill Gates is worth about $124bn. The couple have said they will give most of their money away.

Last week, Forbes said the fortune was being divided. Its headline: “Melinda French Gates Now A Billionaire After Stock Transfer From Bill Gates.”

Citing court documents, the Journal said that about two years before she filed for divorce, Melinda Gates said her marriage had been “irretrievably broken” for some time.

The paper said her legal team included Robert Stephan Cohen, a New York divorce lawyer who has represented Michael Bloomberg and Ivana Trump.

Daddy Issues

We have the most significant sufferer of that malignancy in the White House as few demonstrate the concept of Freud than Ivanka Trump.

I feel the Urban Dictionary sums it up quite nicely:

when a girl has a messed up relationship with her dad. usually the fathers fault. either he left or is acting like a total bitch; as a result the girl might be attracted to older men, or men with anger issues if her father was an angry man, and sometimes will stay in an abusive relationship because it would just feel like home. if he left, don’t ever blame yourself for him leaving. he just missed the best thing that he could have ever have.

To see the back of her and that idiot husband of hers is something I look forward to. But her emotional let alone intellectual intelligence tells me we are not getting rid of them ever as they are sure they are the heirs, the modern day Kennedy’s, a family with its own history of trauma that despite it all we still have some type of reverence if not envy about. The Clintons, the Bush’s all too suffer from that disorder. This dynastic legacy nonsense of course stems from our British roots and the concept of monarchy and family lineage and one watching of The Crown should explain that, but this research piece, does a much better job in understanding how these lineage designs work in supporting a “caste system” style monarchy in capitalist democratic societies.

When you look at American history and the story of our own oligarchs and airstocratic families, you think of the names on doors of institutions, schools and banks are the most familiar but in reality it is those on the products of everyday life – baby powder, gasoline, food and beverages. These are the names we seem to forget were names belonging to a generation of individuals, all lead by controlling dominating patriarachs, and today even as we have many new generations coming forward with women members, they are the daughters and wives and sisters of those capitans of industry who are still largely and almost exclusively white men. The Rockefeller’s and Johnson’s of yesterday are the Sackler’s and Walton’s of today.

Back in the day the daughters of the elite were almost all troubled – Doris Duke, Barbara Hutton, Gloria Vanderbilt were tabloid cover girls. And their history and legacy are now just ones thought of as conventional, almost expected, that of being rich and spoiled, who inevitably spent their riches chasing men and dying alone and ignored, no longer famous nor infamous, as they were women past their prime. Women are always outcast regardless of wealth when the rich and powerful men no longer see their sexuality appealing.

As of late I have been awaiting the trial of Ghislaine Maxwell, the key to the Jeffrey Epstein saga that has not ended with his death, alone and in a jail cell. There are documentaries and numerous podcasts and articles trying to dissect, investigate or somehow explain how this man somehow gained significant wealth with little to no actual experience, contacts or history in the financial sectors on Wall Street or Bond Street or any other street other than those that aligned his numerous homes which he shuffled an inordinate amount of young girls for endless massages. These led to the sexual charges first in 2008 and later in 2019 regarding sexual trafficking. But what has always been the story behind the story is how he managed to find so many girls and that was through one woman, Ghislaine Maxwell.

I had just finished reading the most interesting of articles written by a reporter who spent a better part of a year chasing down every single name listed in the infamous black book of Epstein so infamous it lead to one of his former staff members being put in jail, who actually makes an appearance in a podcast discussing his work and life in the Epstein household, dying later of cancer. Another is a famous chef who owns restaurants with a partner, TV talk show host, Jimmy Kimmel and has yet to speak publicly about his work with the infamous now dead “financier.” So many mysteries, so many podcasts and so many guesses and theories about how, why, where and who was involved will remain or not if this Maxwell woman decides to finally talk.

What Epstein does is yes tell us. when you are rich you are assumed if not given power, be it deserved or not. Wealth like respect is earned and sometimes that too it is not. But the concept of White Privilege is really an exclusive term for those very rich, usually male or those in a family dynamic that shields one from the hard glare of public life. The Sackler’s certainly validated that with regards to their company and its role in the Opioid crisis. I could say the same with regards to the Walton family and their wealth as the Pandemic wears on and how they choose to pay and protect their workers, or not. Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg are the new money class and they are just like the old money class, funny how that when it comes to business they may think they are “changing the world” but when it comes to their world, not so much. The rich are not like everyone else.

The mystery of money is not that mysterious. Much is inherited and then the money lenders of the rich step up to make more money and keep it in the family of their banks and bankers making another layer of rich handlers who move it like they do a penny under a walnut. A mysterious hand game of guess which walnut has the penny. You will get it right eventually or not. And when a family does finally lose it, and they do as it seems to pass to a second generation in which their lack of invincibility or the simple reality that like the rich girls of the past, they have pissed it away via mis-management or scandal. I like the scandal part, usually. But Ghislaine Maxwell is a special kind of loser and she deserves a special kind of hell. But her type are not confined to the rich and again I have written about my distaste for many women who see their lives as one tied to the one who brought you. Yes that old dating rule that you must leave with the one with whom you came. Not me, as that old adage to keep a few bucks stashed in your bra to get a cab out.. mad money.. is a good reason to leave. And we all get mad, but you should leave on your own dime and be beholden to no on. This was Maxwell’s issue, she never left, she colluded and corrupted and destroyed lives. And was given a pass by Epstein in his now illegal agreement with the Feds when he was prosecuted for sex with an underage prostitute. This being tied to Trump once again is something that you cannot ignore, for if it is about exploitation and lies, he is always front and center.

Read the story about the black book and at one point laugh as the stories by these individuals involved with Epstein only make me wonder how rich and how smart he was. As the author clearly points out through his investigation it clearly portrays him as not very smart and again not sure how really rich he was. But his accomplice is the one with the story, the rich girl gone wrong. I agree with the author about Maxwell as she is an example of how white privileged women use their position, and of course that is usually not at all.

The exception of the year on that is Jeff Bezos ex, McKenzie Scott, another woman who will always have that comma, who donated with no strings $4b to varying organizations. She is the WOMAN OF THE YEAR on my list).

But of all the women who stand out as deniers, denizens of the white male patriarchy, and there are many, and say what you want about all those in the orbit of Trump, they are what Dan Akroyd used to call Jane Curtain at the end of SNL news, ” Jane, you ignorant slut.” And hat is all they are, and in this case I am all for slut shaming. But what Maxwell did Trumps that in every way.

Monsters of 2020: Ghislaine Maxwell

A traitor to her gender, loyal to the patriarchy until the end.

• Ramenda Cyrus. Mother Jones
• January 2 2021

Ghislaine Maxwell is the worst type of woman. Lucky to be born into wealth and pomp and unable to do without either, she became a friend to Jeffrey Epstein and a traitor to her gender, loyal to the patriarchy until the end.

Maxwell was Epstein’s girlfriend for a time, and then—allegedly—a procurer of young girls for him. Currently awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges after her arrest in July, she maintains her innocence. “She needed to be essential for him,” a longtime Epstein friend told Mother Jones’ Leland Nally recently. Recruiting girls “is how she kept her place. She had value for him….She ran his house.” 

Keeping her place was her life’s work. Maxwell catered to the needs of the men around her. First there was her father, media baron Robert Maxwell, by all accounts a bullying patriarch whose favor Ghislaine sought and won. And then, after his death, there was Epstein. Maxwell was fine helping him hurt other women, literal children, as long as it kept him grotesquely satisfied and kept her in “the lifestyle she’d lost when her father died,” as Vanity Fair put it. According to two of Epstein’s accusers, she not only enabled but participated in the sexual abuse. She knew what it felt like to be manipulated and exploited, and despite this knowledge she decided the harm was worth inflicting on others in turn. 

Maxwell is a sinister caricature of the complicit white woman—a familiar type in America. Wherever there are overlapping systems of power, there is the figure of the subordinate who subordinates—the plantation mistresses using violence to control their slaves, the racists falsely accusing Black men of rape. The 47 percent plurality of white women who voted for Donald Trump in 2016 are another version. They are here, all around, and not trying even a little bit to change. 

The complicit white woman has accurately assessed that whitemen have the power in this world, and that a woman’s chance for survival often depends on how well she serves their ends—the awful truth, as the consciousness-raising feminists of another age would’ve put it. That was Maxwell. She understood her position as a rich white woman, and she understood the power that came with it if one played the game. She embraced the awful truth and never looked back.

Take a Breath

I have said repeatedly you don’t know me until you know me and then let me know what you think, be honest, be frank and be kind.  Any criticism should come from love and from that comes growth but not in America we just shame, blame, scold and walk away. Working out great.

As I wrote about the recent comments from two women about what it is like to be a face of color be in business or education there is a long road ahead for equity and parity both in gender and race.  But again there is a massive rainbow here and we have not done well finding the pot of gold for any of those who travel along it.  Dorothy may have clicked her heels three times to find her home over the rainbow but for the woman who played her she never made it home in one piece, we do that, kill or be killed; Survival of the fittest, only the strongest survive.  We get it, we really do.

When I gave a friend, who is black, Radley Balko’s articles and books on Warrior Cops and the racism endemic in the criminal justice system he was amazed.  He had no idea that over 1,000 people a year die at the hands of police, George Floyd only one of them.  His Mother is a 911 Operator and she has never discussed her job or her role in how these calls literally are the life and death of many who are the first responders on the other end. But you are right, I am White and should not teach anyone of any color other than my own about my own experience in said system, nor hear of others and in turn share that in any way that is to inform, educate and bring change.  Thank you.  And guess what? I won’t.  I have finally realized sitting in house arrest about how I mocked Nashville and its racism and poverty and values that seemed resistant to growth, to change, to be less religious and more open and then I sat down and realized how Seattle, the good white liberal town was not much different, white privilege is well for the privileged. And by that we mean never had a bad thing ever happen to them ever.  Not all white people are so fortunate but our color at times makes us invisible to those in power until they choose to see it.   And we can choose at any time to see color and just add that to the list of things we note and then we can choose to know them. Fuck that its hard I just want to be with the people who get me and my people. Thanks I am stupid and privileged. Oh how fragile I am!!

In public education, most of the schools are run by faces of color, many Teachers are faces of color, much of the staff are also very much a reflection of the school’s population.  And this varies by district and in each district each neighborhood they too add  color or lack thereof but that is about segregation in another way, economic and the taxes and costs of home that legally separate the have’s from the have nots.  To overcome that since Seattle had ended Affirmative Action which required quotas and numbers, we created a false culture of education. There were/are or have been schools that existed to reach any face and all types of learners, schools that were African American Academy’s, Interagency’ Academy’s and their focus on the kids who needed alternative support, the American Indian Academy, the Seahawks Academy, the Center School, the varying high schools with Academic Achievement, International Baccalaureate Programs, the World School of multicultural languages, and on and on with all kinds of methods and concepts to show how progressive, liberal and good they were.  They have the same in Nashville and they are all dumpsters, and the kids garbage bags. Some are better quality and are compostable and recyclable and are largely white with high achieving faces of color to round out the program. The focus on Sports and the never ending bullshit that makes it the leveler of equality by enabling boys to believe that sports will open the door to a better life.  Yes, been to an NFL Draft?  It is a slave auction just without whips.  There are no professions apparently open to faces of color other than entertainment and athletics, good to know says, Dr. Neil DeGrasse Tyson.

We have good Teachers, we have bad. We have good Administrators, we have bad, but we have one thing in common, nothing is good about public education as it stands today. Sorry but they are all just shitty as hell, from the politics to the course work they are horrific.   I have had conversations with a young black girl who works in my coffee shop, she is lovely. She never heard of the 4 Girls in the Church of Alabama or of Emmett Till. So much for Jersey City schools being quality that answered all I need to know before I ever set foot in one.

  The endless amount of faces of color who have seemingly never heard of many things until pop culture embraces it never ceases to amaze me. And much of that goes for other faces less of color. We live a me me world.    It is as if intellectual curiousity is for freaks of nature who don’t deserve respect or attention and that is when I realized why people hate me.  In the last 10 years in schools I have been accused of slapping a kid because he was black, he later retracted it but after putting me through hell and massive legal bills and I am not alone.  I have been called racist more times than I can count, had money stolen, been verbally abused and had shit thrown out me while kids laughed.  And like a true Masochist I went back for no reason other than I could and thought it will be different next time.  I recall when a Principal came in and said I was reading racist material to a class, it was an editorial by Bob Herbert in the New York Times and the importance of children of color getting into higher education; he has written a book on the subject, and that when I showed him both the article and the photo of Mr. Herbert it was snatched from my hand and never heard about it again. This a class that the former Teacher had quit, the long term sub also quit as the children were having sex in the classroom. Yes, in the classroom; It was a portable and there was a room divider and they would go behind that and have sex.  They were 7th graders.  And there were more stories like this in Seattle, the circle jerk film that circulated in another middle school leading the Police to come and the boys returning to class.  The boys in a high school raping a special needs girl in a toilet, the boy in a high achieving high school raping a student on a field trip and having done it another middle school the year before.  Do I need to add that all of these are children of color and yet you keep hoping and trying that maybe one voice will reach them.  Apparently it was because none did? No face of color seemingly did either and they were there, so explain that to me,  I can wait.

Now I have many horror stories about other kids not black but largely they share one thing in common, they are poor, they are angry and they are in public schools.

The ending of public schools began when the President Voodoo Reagan began to cut funding in his smaller Government concept that has dominated the GOP playbook for decades, it masks classism, racism, arrogance, ignorance and general disregard for the concept of Democracy.  It is not just fueled in racism but it is the biggest burner in the stove.  So when I read books calling all white people fragile and therefore racist I want to say, “You don’t know me and you generalize, you know like if I said all Black kids are crazy.”  Given my experience I could say it’s valid,  but you see I actually vest and talk and try to connect and try to learn and teach simultaneously.  So when you hear the phrase, “I can’t breathe.” Know that many before and after have said the same, at the hands of law enforcement. This white teacher reads and actually wants this to stop and has for years.  I have seen the affects of the broken families, the crime, the pain on the faces of children and I want that to stop too.  But instead I will stop teaching, I will do something white, whatever the fuck that is.

Three Words. 70 Cases. The Tragic History of ‘I Can’t Breathe.’
The deaths of Eric Garner in New York and George Floyd in Minnesota created national outrage over the use of deadly police restraints. There were many others you didn’t hear about.

By Mike Baker, Jennifer Valentino-DeVries, Manny Fernandez and Michael LaForgia
The New York Times
June 29, 2020

As the sun began to rise on a sweltering summer morning in Las Vegas last year, a police officer spotted Byron Williams bicycling along a road west of downtown.

The bike did not have a light on it, so officers flipped on their siren and shouted for him to stop. Mr. Williams fled through a vacant lot and over a wall before complying with orders to drop face down in the dirt, where officers used their hands and knees to pin him down. “I can’t breathe,” he gasped. He repeated it 17 times before he later lapsed into unconsciousness and died.

Eric Garner, another black man, had said the same three anguished words in 2014 after a police officer who had stopped him for selling untaxed cigarettes held him in a chokehold on a New York sidewalk. “I can’t breathe,” George Floyd pleaded in May, appealing to the Minneapolis police officer who responded to reports of a phony $20 bill and planted a knee in the back of his neck until his life had slipped away.

Mr. Floyd’s dying words have prompted a national outcry over law enforcement’s deadly toll on African-American people, and they have united much of the country in a sense of outrage that a police officer would not heed a man’s appeal for something as basic as air.

But while the cases of Mr. Garner and Mr. Floyd shocked the nation, dozens of other incidents with a remarkable common denominator have gone widely unacknowledged. Over the past decade, The New York Times found, at least 70 people have died in law enforcement custody after saying the same words — “I can’t breathe.” The dead ranged in age from 19 to 65. The majority of them had been stopped or held over nonviolent infractions, 911 calls about suspicious behavior, or concerns about their mental health. More than half were black.

Dozens of videos, court documents, autopsies and police reports reviewed in these cases — involving a range of people who died in confrontations with officers on the street, in local jails or in their homes — show a pattern of aggressive tactics that ignored prevailing safety precautions while embracing dubious science that suggested that people pleading for air do not need urgent intervention.

In some of the “I can’t breathe” cases, officers restrained detainees by the neck, hogtied them, Tased them multiple times or covered their heads with mesh hoods designed to prevent spitting or biting. Most frequently, officers pushed them face down on the ground and held them prone with their body weight.

Not all of the cases involved police restraints. Some were deaths that occurred after detainees’ protests that they could not breathe — perhaps because of a medical problem or drug intoxication — were discounted or ignored. Some people pleaded for hours for help before they died.

Among those who died after declaring “I can’t breathe” were a chemical engineer in Mississippi, a former real estate agent in California, a meat salesman in Florida and a drummer at a church in Washington State. One was an active-duty soldier who had survived two tours in Iraq. One was a registered nurse. One was a doctor.

In nearly half of the cases The Times reviewed, the people who died after being restrained, including Mr. Williams, were already at risk as a result of drug intoxication. Others were having a mental health episode or medical issues such as pneumonia or heart failure. Some of them presented a significant challenge to officers, fleeing or fighting.

Departments across the United States have banned some of the most dangerous restraint techniques, such as hogtying, and restricted the use of others, including chokeholds, to only the most extreme circumstances — those moments when officers are in fear for their lives. They have for years warned officers about the risks of moves such as facedown compression holds. But the restraints continue to be used as a result of poor training, gaps in policies or the reality that officers sometimes struggle with people who fight hard and threaten to overpower them.

Many of the cases suggest a widespread belief that persists in departments across the country that a person being detained who says “I can’t breathe” is lying or exaggerating, even if multiple officers are using pressure to restrain the person. Police officers, who for generations have been taught that a person who can talk can also breathe, regularly cited that bit of conventional wisdom to dismiss complaints of arrestees who were dying in front of them, records and interviews show.

That dubious claim was photocopied and posted on a bulletin board at the Montgomery County Jail in Dayton, Ohio, in 2018. “If you can talk then you obviously can [expletive] breathe,” the sign said.

Federal officials have long warned about factors that can cause suffocations in custody, and for the past five years, a federal law has required local police agencies to report all in-custody deaths to the Justice Department or face the loss of federal law enforcement funding.

But the Justice Department, under both President Barack Obama and President Trump, has been slow to enforce the law, the agency’s inspector general found in a 2018 report. Though there has been only scattershot reporting by departments, not a single dollar has been withheld.

Autopsies have repeatedly identified links between the actions of officers and the deaths of detainees who struggled for air, even when other medical issues such as heart disease and drug use were contributing or primary factors. But government investigations often found that the detainees were acting erratically or aggressively and that the officers were therefore justified in their actions.

Only a small fraction of officers have faced criminal charges, and almost none have been convicted.

In the case of Mr. Williams in Las Vegas last year, Police Department investigators determined that the officers did not violate the law. But the death triggered immediate changes, said Lt. Erik Lloyd of the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department’s force investigations team.

Officers are not medical doctors and may believe that someone who says “I can’t breathe” may be trying to escape, he said.

To alleviate potential dangers, officers are told now to promptly get detainees off their stomachs and onto their sides — or up to a sitting or standing position. They are also told to call for medical help if someone has distressed breathing.

“Since the death of Mr. Williams, our department has been extremely aware of someone saying, ‘I can’t breathe,’” Lieutenant Lloyd said. “We have changed the attitude of patrol officers.”

For the relatives of many of the men and women who died under similar circumstances in police custody, watching the video of Mr. Floyd’s arrest in Minneapolis has felt painfully familiar. Silvia Soto’s husband, Marshall Miles, died in 2018 in Sacramento County, Calif., after being pinned down by sheriff’s deputies at a jail. She said she had been feeling both heartbroken and comforted amid the national outrage.

“I don’t feel alone anymore,” Ms. Soto said.
‘You want to kill me?’

While there have been dozens of “I can’t breathe” deaths over the past decade, the emergence of body cameras and surveillance footage has eliminated the invisibility that once shrouded many of these deaths.

Videos from Mr. Garner’s death galvanized changes in neck restraint policies around the country, but problematic techniques for restraining people did not go away. In the six years since then, more than 40 people have died after warning, “I can’t breathe.”

Less than three months after Mr. Garner died, police officers went out to a tidy stucco home near Glendale, Ariz., to investigate a report of a couple arguing.

The officers found Balantine Mbegbu seated in a leather chair with his dinner. Both Mr. Mbegbu and his wife assured them that no argument had taken place. According to police reports, Mr. Mbegbu became indignant when they refused to leave.

“Why are you guys here?” he said, his voice rising. “You want to kill me?”

When he tried to stand, the officers slammed him to the floor, punched him in the head and shot him with a Taser. With Mr. Mbegbu on his stomach, officers put knees on his back and neck.

As his wife, Ngozi Mbegbu, watched them pile on top of her husband, she heard him say, “I can’t breathe. I’m dying,” according to a sworn statement she made. Records show he vomited, began foaming at the mouth, stopped breathing and was pronounced dead.

The county prosecutor’s office determined that “the officers did not commit any act that warrants criminal prosecution.”

Cases in which detainees protested that they could not breathe, before dying, continued to occur. Their words could be heard on audio or video recordings, or were otherwise documented in official witness statements or reports.

In 2015, Calvon Reid died in Coconut Creek, Fla., after officers fired 10 shots at him with a Taser.

In 2016, Fermin Vincent Valenzuela was asphyxiated after police officers in Anaheim, Calif., put him in a neck hold while trying to arrest him. His family won a $13 million jury verdict.

In 2017, Hector Arreola died in Columbus, Ga., after officers forced him to the ground, cuffed his hands behind him and leaned on his back, with one officer brushing off his complaints: “He’s fine,” he said.

In 2018, Cristobal Solano was arrested in Tustin, Calif., and then died after at least seven deputies worked together to subdue him on the floor of a holding cell, some with their knees on his back.

In 2019, Vicente Villela died in an Albuquerque jail after telling guards who were holding him down with their knees that he could not breathe. “Right, because they’re having to hold you down,” one of the guards said.

Then last week, the Police Department in Tucson, Ariz., released video of an encounter on April 21 with Carlos Ingram Lopez, who was naked and behaving erratically when officers forced him to lie face down on the floor of a garage with his hands handcuffed behind his back. Part of the time, Mr. Lopez’s head was covered with a blanket and a hood. He was held down for 12 minutes, crying for air, for water and for his grandmother. Then he, too, died.
‘If you can talk you can breathe’

One of the reasons such cases keep occurring may be the persistent belief on the part of police officers that a detainee who is complaining that he cannot breathe is breathing enough to talk.

Edward Flynn, the former police chief in Milwaukee, said in a deposition in 2014 that this idea was once part of training for officers there and persisted as a “common understanding” even if it was wrong. Other departments have told their officers the same thing, records show, and the notion shows up often in interactions with detainees.

“If you’re talking, you’re breathing — I don’t want to hear it,” a sheriff’s deputy told Willie Ray Banks, who was struggling for air after officers in Granite Shoals, Texas, restrained and Tased him in 2011.

But the medical facts are more complicated. While it may technically be true that someone speaking is passing air through the windpipe, Dr. Carl Wigren, an independent pathologist, said that even someone able to mutter a phrase such as “I can’t breathe” may not be able to take the full breaths needed to take in sufficient oxygen to maintain life.

The “if you can talk” notion has persisted even in places like the jail in Montgomery County, Ohio, which had to pay a $3.5 million settlement last year in connection with the 2012 death of an inmate named Robert Richardson, who had been jailed for failing to show up for a child support hearing.

A fellow inmate called for help after Mr. Richardson, 28, had what was described as a possible seizure. Sheriff’s deputies cuffed his hands behind his back and restrained him face down on the floor, pushing on his back and shoulders, and eventually on his head and neck, according to court documents.

Witnesses said Mr. Richardson repeatedly told deputies he could not breathe, until, after 22 minutes, he stopped moving. He was pronounced dead less than an hour later.

It was that jail facility where, six years later, the photocopied sign about being able to breathe if you could talk was posted on the bulletin board.
‘We literally had to sit there and watch my brother die’

Police officers often failed to seek prompt medical attention when a detainee expressed problems breathing, and that has proved to be a factor in several deaths. In some of these cases, the person in custody had recently been Tased or restrained, but other times they were suffering from acute disorders, such as lung infections, and languished for hours. Often, this appeared to be because officers did not take the detainees’ claims seriously.

When 40-year-old Rodney Brown told police officers in Cleveland he could not breathe after being Tased multiple times during a struggle in 2010, one of them responded: “So? Who gives a [expletive]?”

One of the police officers radioed for paramedics but later said he did so only because it was a required procedure when someone had been Tased; he did not convey that Mr. Brown had claimed he could not breathe.

A lawyer for the city in that case told a panel of judges that the officers did not have the medical expertise to know when someone was in a medical crisis or simply exhausted from a vigorous fight, according to an audio recording.

Another troubling case occurred in March 2019 when the police in Montebello, Calif., were called to the home of David Minassian, 39, a former vice president at a property management firm who had suffered a heroin overdose.

His older sister, Maro Minassian, a certified emergency medical technician, had given her brother a dose of naloxone, a medication that reverses the effects of opiate overdoses. He jolted awake but still appeared to have fluid in his lungs, and she dialed 911, anxious to get him to a hospital.

But it was the police, not paramedics, who arrived next. Ms. Minassian said three Montebello officers entered her family’s home as her brother was flailing on the floor.

At least two of the officers slammed him to the ground and put their knees into his back as they tried to cuff him, Ms. Minassian said, and remained on top of him until he stopped talking. “I told them, ‘My brother can’t breathe,’” Ms. Minassian said through tears. “We literally had to sit there and watch my brother die.”
‘Please take the mask off’

Despite years of concerns about some of the potentially dangerous techniques used to subdue people in custody, law enforcement agents have continued to use them.

In the 2018 case involving Ms. Soto’s husband, Marshall Miles, officers struggled to get him into jail after arresting him on suspicion of vandalism and public intoxication.

The Sheriff’s Department had produced training materials as early as 2004 warning about the dangers of suffocation when people were restrained face down or hogtied with their hands and feet linked behind their backs.

But those warnings apparently went unheeded. Mr. Miles, 36, was hogtied while being brought in by the California Highway Patrol, even though the Sheriff’s Department, which runs the jail, no longer allowed the restraint. Deputies removed him from the hogtie but held him face down for more than 15 minutes as he repeatedly said, “I can’t breathe.” They then carried him handcuffed and shackled to a cell, where at least three deputies put their weight on his facedown body while he groaned ever more faintly. About two minutes later, he fell silent and then stopped breathing, according to video of the death.

An autopsy concluded that he died from a combination of physical exertion, mixed drug intoxication and restraint by law enforcement. Hogtie restraints were used in four other deaths over the past decade that were examined by The Times.

Another technique used in a series of cases with fatal outcomes, including at least two this year, has been the use of hoods or masks designed to prevent people from spitting on or biting officers. Law enforcement agencies around the world have grappled with whether to use them to protect officers despite concerns about whether the masks are safe.

Video from 2012 shows how one of the masks was used on James W. Brown, an Army sergeant stationed at Fort Bliss in El Paso who had a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder. Sergeant Brown, 26, was supposed to serve a two-day sentence at the county jail for a drunken-driving conviction, but officials said he became aggressive after learning he would be jailed longer.

With his hands cuffed behind him, Sergeant Brown can be seen in a video seated in a chair, surrounded by guards in riot gear holding him down. Deputies had placed a mesh-style mask over the lower half of his face, and he wore it for more than five minutes before telling the guards and a medical worker that he could not breathe.

“Please take the mask off,” Sergeant Brown pleads. “I cannot breathe. Please!”

He passed out shortly afterward, and he was pronounced dead the next day. A county autopsy ruled that his death was caused by a sickle-cell crisis — natural causes — but a forensic pathologist later hired by the county concluded that his blood condition had been exacerbated by the restraint procedures.

Sergeant Brown’s relatives sued El Paso County, the jail and 10 officers for wrongful death and other claims. The case was later settled.

“I feel like they treated him like he was less than an animal,” said Sergeant Brown’s mother, Dinetta Scott. “Who treats somebody like that?”

Ebony and Ivory

Bad news for those in culture wars we got 998 other problems than a simple issue over those between those who are black and those who are white. Sorry folks I have been in public education to long to realize that we got a big spinning wheel that never quite lands on that lucky seven.  And it about seven colors and identities that I can think of the top of my head that don’t include the top two: Indigenous, Indian, Arabic, Latin, LGBQT, Mixed Race, Asian, Religion. Now within each of those categories are sub classifications just look at LGBQT, and now they have added a plus for some reason I am not sure, experimenting? I don’t know.. then we have binary, non binary, cis and the rest  Get it? Got it? Good.  No of course you don’t. By God even I am sick of all the constant hyphenated  markers we seem to need to identify ourselves.

In my morning discussion with the Concierge at my desk, one of the more annoying and oddly arrogant ones who has more hyphens than an English Lord, we were discussing race and how many confuse him as being Black in identity.  He is West Indian on his father’s side and Puerto Rican on his mothers side.  His fiancé is of  Philippine descent and he knows little to nothing about that side of his cultural history. And given what I know of him that makes sense as he is the most self involved individual I have ever known.  He is what my mother calls an “Eye” Specialist as everything is Me.I.Mine.  He sees everything in his world view from his own prism and that is via a Gay, West Indian, Latino male.  That is a lot going on right there.  Once we run through his indignities or beliefs on subjects that relate to him and his experiences alone we have little more to say as I doubt he has ever read a book or a newspaper that is about anything outside of himself.  And why? I also think he believes no one else knows this as he rarely moves outside a circle of people who have knowledge outside their selves either.   We call “those people” a Narcissist.  Again race and sexual identity and gender have little to do with it, it truly is a colorblind disorder!   And living in a bubble of people just like you may make you feel better but it also makes you really fucking boring and that is how I feel even after a 10 minute exchange with this young man, bored out of my skull.  Seriously folks learn to talk to people even boring ones then you can find way more ways to hate people than based on race/gender/etc.

But you see if you have this discussion today with anyone you will have a blowout. You will be promptly labeled, culture canceled and of course lose your job and be shamed on social media, which in turn mainstream media will pick up as it was a slow news day and now everyone knows your name, your fuck up and what an asshole you are.  What a great day ahead for anyone who needs to be “schooled” or simply ignored as having their own opinion and it has nothing to do with you.   Who the fuck cares about what someone whom you encounter on your day to day has to do with you and your quality of life is beyond me.  Again you can apply that to those who are racists, homophobes, conservatives, religious crackpots, etc, etc, etc. And they are to be left alone, literally left alone, as what you accomplish is well nothing and if it happened to you how would you feel.   Seriously digging up past regressions on folks does what to them? And what more importantly, for you exactly?

And this brings me to my discussion with the Concierge and race. He was at Target with his fiancee and a woman without a mask was in the store and they refused to help her or ring up her purchases.  (I am assuming it was not this bad) As it was early they only had two registers open and the line was backing up.  The woman refused, ranting about how she has health problems and the masks have Co2 and the rest, so he decides to explain to her what Co2 is and that she is wrong and just put on a mask. During this encounter the woman calls him a “Nigger” and his fiancé  a Mexican and that is why Trump is building a wall to keep his people out.   Okay lets stop for a minute here.  Why are you bothering.  Just walk around her and demand to be rung up or walk away and find self check or get a Manager. The scene escalated and guess what?  He never told me the end of the story if the woman was escorted out, her shit rang up and did he get his shit and how long this all went on for an what about all the others standing through this shit.  I have no clue, as then it was about how he has only been called that name three times and that first was Fourth grade and then in some other grade at another different school and then there at Target.  Oh wait, he was called “Sand Nigger” by a Southern woman on the subway one day going to work and he was wearing scrubs so she should have known he was not a Terrorist, which is what she accused him of being.  (Don’t start me on the scrubs that is farce right there and please change your clothes at work) So this story is a circle jerk at this point so, okay, point being? Oh wait this is about you.  Okay. then.  So here is your discussion on race, its a one up game where you all share your indignation and stories of shame and then who has the worst one, maybe the one where you end up being murdered on the street by a Cop sitting on you wins.  Fuck me.

When we are focusing on the singular racist history of America with regards to the indignities done to Black Americans we are neglecting the rest done to others, and done largely thanks to those who were both white and male.  (Yes women were involved but again they are largely marginalized in society as well so get over it) It is why I am not engaged with the protest when I see a sign on a store that says Black Trans Lives Matter that seems very specific and direct and what about the other folks who are Trans? Do their lives not matter?

The one thing we do share is a state of being and that is being a Human.  I have long identified as Humanist when asked about my religion, versus saying Atheist, as that seems less hostile. Although in Nashville I felt enough of the hiding, it was like being Gay in the 50s, I needed to come out and be open but I still think humanism is a point made clear.  It takes my age, my gender and my color out of the equation for a minute.

In my years of teaching I have met many kids of many backgrounds from many cultures and lives unlike my own and that has taught me compassion, empathy, understanding, and more importantly acceptance and tolerance.  True kids are really annoying but that again is colorblind.  My great fear is that kids now will see me and immediately presume I am an enemy just by the color of my skin,  and test that in ways that normal hazing of subs will be magnified.  It is already bad as a Substitute Teacher and this summer of unrest will fuel that confusion and rage as they have already been out of school for six months when September comes so I don’t see this being a great year right off the top.   This is where I do the Nashville way where I don’t write my name on the board, just the instructions, make them do self attendance and speak as little as possible.  Good times folks.  But my days of engaging kids in free thinking discussion and open dialog I am afraid is over.  And when I hear repeatedly that I am of white privilege it diminishes me and my personal narrative; This is the concept most important in activism, that of the personal story or history that lends to engagement and connection.  Yes judge me lest be judged.

I share this opinion piece from The Daily News and note that one of the author’s is Robin Quivers who has been the sidekick of Howard Stern for decades now.  And again during all the strum and drang of Howard’s own role if perpetuating some seriously disturbing issues around gender, sex and identity including racism I think it is telling that they have been work partners through this all and managed to resolve any conflicts to maintain that partnership.  It is one we could all learn from.

The trouble with our talk about race: Maybe obsession over racism is the problem
By Naomi Aeon and Robin Quivers
New York Daily News
Jun 22, 2020

The racial mess we’re in is bigger than we realize. Versions of terror and brutality, for generations, have been wielded against black people, from slavery to segregation to lynching to the KKK, to all manner of prejudices, biases and micro-aggressions.

We have never properly reckoned with the problem. As a result, overt and covert forms of racism — against black, mixed, indigenous and other people of color — pervade American culture to this day.

Then along came this latest spate of police killings, each of them an outrage, and an assault on the collective human soul. It’s become all too repetitive, this vicious circle of “incident, protest, riot, calm.”

What’s promising is that the response in the larger society feels different this time. It’s dynamic. As if there’s finally a true awakening to the magnitude of a problem many are in denial about. It’s exciting to consider the possibility of race relations improving.

There’s reason for hope and optimism. And yet, looking closer, we find ourselves skeptical and more than a little concerned. A question looms in our minds: Could it be that the conversation on race in the U.S., as it’s emerged in these past few weeks, is creating as many problems as it’s attempting to resolve?

For all the earnest attempts to school the masses on race, we still so often talk about blacks and whites as though they are two clear, binary categories, and the only two that matter. It’s an oversimplification of the facts.

To truly move forward, we need to understand that blackness and whiteness — like all racial categories — are complicated, layered and paradoxical. Both labels contain within them all the diverse range of human experiences, in the U.S. and across the planet.

We suspect that, because it largely ignores this reality, the current conversation on race may do as much to reinforce race-based thinking as it does to address racism. The way we are “educating people” about racial problems is doubling as a form of social conditioning.

Here everyone, read this particular handful of books, watch these videos, say these approved phrases, repeat these words. Here everyone, gesture and posture appropriately. It’s surely unintentional, but it winds up reinscribing a narrow strand of race-thinking.

It’s an inadvertent mass brain-washing rather than an opportunity for genuine, deep, transformative education that touches the heart and mind.

We thought about this as we watched the “Sesame Street” CNN Town Hall for children and families.

It sounds so sensible to learn how to teach your young kids how to be anti-racist. The show shared an inspiring message. Excellent questions were asked, including: How can we grow the circle of who we care about and expand our hearts? How can we improve how we treat each other and how we perceive of each other? We found this instructive and wise.

The overriding theme of the show was, “we can do better,” and who could argue with that? Yet even as we were moved, we couldn’t help but give pause. Does it really make sense for a young child to have the seed planted within them to “do better”? Are they doing badly? Are they guilty of something?

Are we inadvertently planting shame and guilt in our kids by reflexively repeating certain mantras? Are we telling black viewers — planting within them a seed — that they are somehow inferior? Are we underlining their victim status, rendering it official?

Are we limiting the way young people see the world by demanding they think of themselves, first and foremost, as members of a race rather than, first and foremost, as human beings?

Race-based thinking will never solve the problem of racism. Strident race-based thinking only adds to the problem. It’s turning out that racism has a kissing cousin in this sudden rise of rigid race-thinking. It’s a pollution in the air with a suffocating effect. All of us must learn to think more nimbly. All of us must breathe.

Aeon is a consultant and teacher. Quivers is a broadcaster.